


Collected Short Stories

by nikkilittle



Category: Twilight Zone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2019-06-26 12:24:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 45,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15663177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nikkilittle/pseuds/nikkilittle
Summary: A collection of original Twilight Zone short stories.  First chapter is a table of contents with a complete description of each chapter.  Each chapter is a complete story.Don't try to read this on a computer.  Download it and transfer the file to an e-reader.





	1. Table of Contents

Collected Short Stories of Nikki Little

Table of Contents

 

1\. Table of Contents

Table of contents with a complete description of each chapter. Each chapter is a complete story.

2\. A Christmas Eve Story

On a snowy Christmas Eve, a waitress in a shabby restaurant on the poor side of town receives an extraordinary tip from a mysterious customer.

3\. Nameless

A homeless amnesiac drifts across an American economic wasteland unaware not only of name, but of sexual identity as well.

4\. The Eye of a Needle

A small restaurant owner wakes up one morning to find that at least 95 percent of the world's population has disappeared. It's not the Rapture.

5\. What You Reap

A purchasing agent for Cheap-Mart unwittingly unleashes a plague in the United States.

6\. Tracy

Two minimum-wage workers in a pizza parlour find a second chance for love. There's a catch, however...

7\. The Girl Who Talked to Trees

A sixteen-year-old girl who attempts suicide makes a startling discovery of the world around her.

8\. Chess Lessons

A love story, of sorts.

9\. The Devil and the Priest

A priest tempts the Devil.

10\. The Lost Vision of Walter Will

An affluent newspaper pundit purchases an antique mirror and takes a trip through Alice's Looking Glass -- or so he thinks.

11\. Abolition Day

While visiting the Lincoln Memorial, a stockbroker catches a glimpse of the world that might have been.

12\. Darwin's Feast

A politician who preaches rugged self-reliance to poor people gets a taste of the dog-eat-dog society that he advocates.

13\. The Portrait in Burnt Sienna

A schoolteacher discovers an unsettling, single-color portrait of a man falling through the air hidden behind the backplate of a workbench in a rented home. It appears to portray a location located nearby. Curiosity gets the best of her.

14\. The Fears of Albert Weik

Meet Albert Weik -- a petty, mean-spirited man of a type all too familiar to most of us. Albert Weik, however, has a special talent, or curse, in that "worst fears" which he spouts regularly at family reunions always come true eventually.

15\. Kitty Take a Walk

A disabled elderly woman and the daughter who cares for her find unexpected joy in a strange little game involving a small cat figurine that was once a perfume bottle.

16\. Senior Portrait

It's 1976. A senior girl in high school has spent her entire life as a tomboy. Rarely wearing a dress. Never wearing makeup. Almost never varying her hairdo. So what happens when she shows up the day of the school yearbook portraits with a new hairdo, a new dress, and wearing makeup for the first time ever? A portrait of a lost era.

17\. Boxwood and Rosewood

A journalist finds a very rare and valuable chess set at an abandoned homeless site. And makes the mistake of taking it home.

18\. A Game of Checkers

A father and daughter burdened by caregiving duties can't seem to find time to play a game of checkers.


	2. A Christmas Eve Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On a snowy Christmas Eve, a waitress in a shabby restaurant on the poor side of town receives an extraordinary tip from a mysterious customer.

A Christmas Eve Story

by Nikki Little

 

On a snowy Christmas Eve, in one of those cookie-cutter chain restaurants, a waitress had just finished waiting on a well-dressed man, his elegant wife, and two polite and well-mannered children. After the man had paid at the cash register and had led his family out the door, the waitress cleared the table off and reached for her tip. It was a single bill that was visible from a distance, and her first thought had been that it was one dollar. "Cheapskate!" she thought. However, the waitress was mistaken. On this snowy Christmas Eve, this waitress had just received a one-hundred dollar tip. The waitress' name was "Claire," and she was an honest woman. She chased the man to his car and stopped him just as he was about to pull away. "Sir, there must be some mistake. This is a one-hundred dollar bill." The man looked up at her with a bright smile, as if surprised.

"No, my dear. It is no mistake. I have all that I could possibly want. That one-hundred dollar bill means little to me. I only regret that others who enjoy as much as I are not similarly generous. Especially on Christmas Eve."

Claire was now mystified. What was a wealthy man doing in a chain restaurant on Christmas Eve? There were far finer places he could have chosen. Claire was about to open her mouth, but the man read her mind.

"I came to this restaurant this evening because you were the most deserving waitress in this town. You could say that I'm making my Christmas rounds."

The man smiled and his wife and children nodded with pleasant smiles on their faces. For Claire, it all seemed dreamlike. The man drove off and Claire wondered if it really happened. Claire looked in her hand and all doubts disappeared. For a moment, it seemed that tears would overwhelm her, and she dashed into the restaurant's ladies' room into a stall.

Fine grit on the floor of the restroom scratched under Claire's shoes. The dim light reflecting off the dingy yellowed wall reminded her of her appointed station in life. "Do I truly deserve no better than this?" thought Claire. She held the bill up in front of her and noticed that the portrait on the one-hundred-dollar bill was not of Benjamin Franklin. The bill certainly looked real. Fine threads snaked through the bill. Delicate details were perfect. No ink smudged.

"I was wondering how long it would take you to notice that the portrait was wrong!"

Claire blinked. The portrait on the piece of paper -- it wasn't really money -- was talking to her. "I've finally lost my mind," thought Claire. The portrait continued to speak.

"You've gone unrewarded for the life you've lived long enough. You've spent your entire life always doing what was expected of you -- what you thought were your obligations. You've always been polite and respectful. You're honest to a fault. You're kind to animals. I know that you have three stray cats at home, one of whom has only three legs. You've been treated like a doormat all your life, and that breaks my heart. You're a good woman, Claire, and you deserve a chance at happiness. I'm going to give you a list of seven choices. You may choose only one. Choose wisely, my dear, for this is a once-in-a-lifetime event. You will never see me again after you have chosen."

Claire was a bit suspicious, and thought her mind was playing tricks on her. For a split second, she even wondered if the speaking portrait was a demon who would soon wave a contract in her face. The portrait, however, remained as mysterious as ever.

"Your first possible choice is the most obvious one -- wealth. Material wealth would solve many of your problems, although it would create others."

Claire didn't hesitate. "I'd like to hear what the other choices are before I make up my mind." Claire was still skeptical of the whole thing.

The door to the restroom creaked opened and one woman entered. Claire and the portrait both shut up. The woman entered the stall right next to Claire and seemed to take forever to finish her business. Claire noticed that she did not bother to flush or wash her hands before leaving.

"Ah, yes," continued the portrait, "your other choices." Claire's next option was wisdom. This sounded a bit better to Claire, but, truth was, Claire was a most intelligent woman. Well-educated, too. She had a bachelor's degree in English which turned out to be completely useless in the job market. Hence she was still waiting tables at the age of 33. Just because she was a waitress did not mean that her head was empty.

"I don't mean to sound arrogant, but wisdom is something which I think I already possess. My bullshit detector is constantly going off. Right now I think that I'm hallucinating. I'm probably passed out on the floor of the restroom and my fellow employees are waiting for the ambulance. Wait until the hospital finds out that I don't have insurance."

"No, my dear. You're not passed out and you're not hallucinating. The third traditional choice is a long life."

"A long life?" laughed Claire. "Of this?" Claire scowled. "I'm not stupid. A long life of scrounging in poverty is not an option at all. Next choice."

"Now for the unconventional choices. The fourth choice is that you hear people's thoughts as if they were speaking. Never again would you wonder what someone is really thinking."

Claire looked at the portrait incredulously. "That would be torture! There would be no peace ever! No thanks! I especially don't want to hear my fellow employees' thoughts. The thoughts of the customers would probably be even worse. No thanks!"

"The fifth choice is to be able to tell when people are lying. You won't hear other people's thoughts, but you'll always know when they are lying."

Claire skoffed. "I already have that ability. People don't even attempt to hide the fact that they're lying anymore. They do it openly and brazenly. Next choice."

"The sixth choice is a family of your own. A husband and children. A home."

Claire bit her lip. This was the most tempting option so far. Yet Claire had doubts. "Marriage is never a sure thing. Even if the man is perfect, I might not be. I've spent my whole life waiting on customers. I don't think I want to add a husband and children to my list of obligations. I'm middle-aged, and I'm feeling a bit weary."

The portrait winced as he knew that 33 was not yet middle-aged. Life was beating the stuffings out of Claire, and he could see it in the premature lines on her face. Thin and haggard, it was obvious that Claire had not enough time or money to take care of herself properly. "The seventh choice is a blank. Is there something that you greatly desire? Be very careful with this choice, for receiving what you desire most can turn out to be a curse."

"You mean I can create my own choice? Yes, there is something I greatly desire. I want to live in a place without money. I want to be in a place where people freely share what they have and take what they need. I want to live in a place where the relentless refrain of 'I, me, mine' does not exist. I want to live in a place like that mythical kingdom in that book. I want to live in a real-life Shangri-La."

The portrait in the one-hundred-dollar bill scratched his head. "Yes, I know of such a place, but only one." The bill vanished from Claire's hand and an oddly-dressed young man appeared before her. Claire wasn't sure of what she was seeing, and reached out to touch him. Her hand passed through air.

"I know of such a place, but it is where I live. You are still fairly young. So young. Are you certain this is what you want?"

"Yes, I'm sure," said Claire. "No doubts."

The mirage-like figure before her became solid. "Take my hand, my dear. Walk with me."

Claire took the young man's hand.

In the restaurant, the manager and other employees were wondering what was taking Claire so long in the restroom. The female dining room supervisor, who ran the cash register and seated customers, went into the women's restroom to find Claire. She found Claire sprawled on the gritty floor in front of a dingy toilet. Claire was no longer breathing. Claire's face was an ashen gray. There was no blood anywhere. No sign of foul play or a suicide attempt. There was no pulse. The dining room supervisor noticed Claire's right hand tightly closed around something and pried her fingers open. There was nothing.

Outside, a slow, steady rain of large, fluffy flakes fell. A light dusting of snow covered everything. This year, it would be a White Christmas, and the ugliness of Claire's little piece of the world would be hidden.

 

The End


	3. Nameless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A homeless amnesiac drifts across an American economic wasteland unaware not only of name, but of sexual identity as well.

TV Shows » Twilight Zone » Nameless  
nikkilittle  
Author of 40 Stories   
Rated: M - English - Mystery/Suspense - Updated: 10-21-09 - Published: 12-31-08 - Complete - id:4759351  
Title: Nameless  
Category: TV Shows » Twilight Zone  
Author: nikkilittle  
Language: English, Rating: Rated: M  
Genre: Mystery/Suspense  
Published: 12-31-08, Updated: 12-31-08  
Chapters: 2, Words: 8,696

Chapter 1: "Genderfree"

The man behind the counter at the homeless shelter repeated his question to me: "I'm sorry to have to ask you this, but which section? Male or female? It's really hard to tell with all that dirt on your face." I stepped back from the counter, but a good look at the rest of me was not likely to be of much help, either. I was about five feet tall, had red hair and freckles, had a very slight build, and had a flat chest. I thought I was male, but I wasn't sure. Taking a look between the legs hadn't helped me, either: I didn't remember which sets of "equipment" went with which sex. The feeling was bizarre. I didn't know who I was, how old I was, or even which sex I was. I asked a question, "Do the showers have dividers for a bit of privacy?" In many homeless shelters, there were no dividers. To my relief, he said "Yes, there are dividers." I told him, "Male."

I put what few belongings I had into a locker and walked over to the shower room. It was rather crowded, and I did not want to expose myself to anyone. I walked into the shower and undressed there. I hung my clothes on a hook at the back of the shower stall. It felt wonderful to wash away weeks of grit and grime. I had been afraid to shower at other homeless shelters because of the lack of dividers in the shower stalls. I did not want anyone to see me. When I finished and put my clothes back on – they were still filthy – I hesitated to leave the stall. I knew what was coming. I stepped out and was immediately greeted with a wolf whistle. "Hey, little darlin', ain't you in the wrong section?" I looked up and fixed the whistler with a look of death. He immediately backed up and apologized. "Whoa! I'm sorry. Damn, I thought you were a chick."

This homeless shelter had some washing machines and dryers that did not require coins. I took the few clothes I had – all men's clothing – and threw them into the washing machine. I decided to stay with my clothes because I did not want to risk losing the few clothes that I had. When my few clothes had finished drying, I went into a closet to change and came right back to wash the filthy clothes that I had been wearing. Who knew when I would get a chance to wash my clothes again? I looked forward to sleeping in clean clothes that night. It had been a very long time.

The next morning I went job hunting which was required to keep my bunk bed and locker. I knew there was no point to looking for a "good" job and so walked into the first mom-and-pop pizza parlour I encountered while walking. There weren't many of those left. The corporate chains had killed most of them off. I had worked in pizza parlours before and thought that this might be one place in which I had some chance of getting hired. The application had that same annoying question that all job applications had: sex? I hesitated for a moment and then checked "male." I wanted to work back in the kitchen as a cook and most pizza parlour cooks were male. It would have been tempting to check "female" if I had wanted to work as a table server, but I knew I didn't have a good enough memory for that. Of course, much of the information in the application was made-up because I didn't remember. For example, I wrote down "Tracy Smith" as my name. When I came to the work history section, I filled it out but left blank the addresses of all the pizza parlours I had worked at – there were quite a few – with the explanation of "now closed." For the most part, it was the truth. The collapse of the middle class in the U.S. had lessened the demand for pizza. I went up to the manager, "Pop" no doubt, and asked if I could give a demonstration of what I knew. Would he let me make a pizza from start to finish? He thought this was unusual, but readily agreed. I made the same type of vegetarian pizza that I had made in so many other mom-and-pop pizza parlours and cooked it flawlessly. "Pop" took a taste and said, "You're hired if you want the cook's job. Unfortunately it doesn't pay any more than minimum wage. The corporate chains have driven standards down through the floor. To compete on price, we have to do this. I do sincerely apologize and will understand if you refuse the job." I accepted the job and told him that having a job would assure me of the right to keep a bunk at the homeless shelter down the road. He winced when I told him that. There was guilt all over his face. He gave me a schedule in which my first day was Monday of next week. I had a few days before I started.

Next I went into a "free store" run by a Catholic charity and picked out some old used clothes. I picked out two pants and two shirts. There were no types of underwear or socks available. Those you had to buy. I walked by a rack which had a dark blue dress that was pleated and looked like it came down to just below the knees. Something in me really wanted that dress. No one was looking and I snatched it and stuffed it in my bag. I knew I would have fun trying to explain the dress to the clerk who inspected all bags at the front door and wrote down what was taken. There was no cost, but I still had to "check out."

The young woman at the front of the store dumped the contents of my bag on the counter and started to write in an inventory book. She raised an eyebrow when she saw the dress mixed in with the two shirts and two pants. She looked me over very closely and said, "You're the most ambiguous-looking person I've ever seen. I honestly believe that you could fool everyone if you wore that dress. I hope you're not a prostitute." I told her that I had just gotten a job at the mom-and-pop pizza parlour down the road. There was no need to mention the name; all the other pizza parlours in the area were corporate-owned. She seemed genuinely relieved to hear that I had a job and told me that she ate there herself sometimes. "Perhaps you'll make a pizza for me someday," she said.

I returned to the homeless shelter and informed the desk clerk that I had found a job at the mom-and-pop pizza parlour down the road. The clerk seemed quite surprised: "It's not often that one of our residents manages to find a job. Living in a homeless shelter is usually considered a disqualification from employment." The "wolf" who had whistled at me in the shower room saw me as I headed for a closet to try on some of my treasures. Before I could say no, he had peeked into my bag and had seen the dress. He looked again into the bag and then at me in surprised confusion. "Are you a transvestite?" I suddenly realized that the "wolf" was a college graduate. He looked at me in confusion and then said, "I know I should be ashamed of myself for asking, but I'd really like to see you in that dress." I smirked and asked him if he was gay. He flushed and said, "Definitely not! I'm just not really convinced that you're a guy. I've got some doubts." I did want to try on the dress – Lord help me! - and told him to wait outside the closet. I quickly switched into the dress and put my pants and shirt into the bag. I opened the door and let him in. I was not the least bit scared that he might attack me because I had successfully fended off numerous attacks before. I was much stronger than I looked. He looked at me and said, "Damn! You must be a chick. You're too pretty to be a guy!" I couldn't help laughing at that and cocked my head to one side and said, "Why thank you! How very sweet of you!" Then I realized what I was doing and had a sudden attack of panic: "This was a bad idea. Get out. I need to change back before somebody sees me wearing this dress." He eyed me ever more suspiciously but backed out of the closet as I asked.

After I came out of the closet, the wolf motioned me to a vacated corridor. "You're a chick. No guy could have given a performance that convincing. What's going on?" I told him that I had lost my memory and not only didn't know who I was or how old I was, I didn't even know which sex I was. He looked incredulous. "All you have to do is look between your legs if nothing else is convincing," he said. I told him that I didn't even remember which sets of "equipment" went with which sex. "Damn! You are screwed up. Maybe it would be a good idea to get a doctor to look at you. Better yet, a psychologist. If you go to the front counter, they might be able to arrange a physical examination for you which would solve this mystery."

I did as he suggested and went to the front counter to ask for a physical examination. I gave as the reason that I had not had a physical exam in years. I was given an appointment at a city clinic for tomorrow without any questions. The city clinic was a 1.5-mile walk away. There were no buses. There hadn't been any buses for years.

I went in the rest room and waited for a stall to open as I usually did. A guy at one of the wall urinals questioned me: "I've never seen you use one of the stand-ups. You know a couple of us are suspicious that you're a girl." What could I say? I said nothing and waited for a stall to open. The guy at the urinal zipped up and then grabbed my arm. Big mistake. My foot came up lightning quick and caught him square between the legs. While he was sprawled on the floor, I ran out. I went up the stairs two floors and found a bathroom at the end of the hallway next to an office. I made a point of it never to use the main bathrooms again.

The next day I walked the one and a half miles to the clinic for my physical exam and was greeted with a clipboard and seven or eight sheets of paperwork. Right up at the top again was that annoying question: sex? I checked "male" mainly to delay the fuss. I would find out soon enough. As in the pizza parlour, much of the information I gave was made-up. Once again I gave my name as "Tracy Smith". It took me a half hour of scribbling to fill out all the paperwork, and I wondered if anyone would ever look at it after I completed it. After I handed the nurse the paperwork, she motioned for me to follow her to a room. After a wait that seemed an eternity, a doctor walked in. A woman doctor. For some inexplicable reason, I felt relieved at this. I thought I was male, but my doubts were increasing. First she had me strip to my underwear – I was wearing male underwear, of course – and did the usual tests. Then finally came that moment where I had to pull my underwear down. The doctor caught one glimpse and backed away in horror. Then she walked up again to me and asked, "May I look closer? You have a most unusual characteristic." I said "Okay," and she took a closer look. "You appear to be a fully functional hermaphrodite. If you are fully functional, you will be an almost unique case. I don't know for sure." I asked her, "Are you telling me that I'm both male and female at the same time?" "Yes," she said. "The reason your appearance seems to be so ambiguous – I noticed that at first glance at you and I'm sure everyone else does, too – is that your body appears to be in a state of indecision. The removal of one set of sex organs would solve the problem of which sex you are. I need to make an appointment with a specialist for you. You are such a unique case that I'm sure that the necessary operation would be done without charge. You need not worry about cost."

I mentioned that I had no transportation and no money. She said not to worry. "Someone will be sent to pick you up. You are currently living at a homeless shelter?" "Yes," I said, and gave the address. She arranged an appointment for me with a specialist for the next day and arranged a taxi for me. I was a bit unused to getting special treatment.

The next day the specialist gave me an explanation of my choices and what would happen with each choice. Of course the first choice was "Do nothing." This was, of course, the safest choice, but it was definitely not my choice. The second choice was to have the female organs removed. The third choice was to have the male organs removed. The specialist told me that I needed to think about it for awhile, but I told her that I had already made up my mind. "I was afraid of that," she said. "The right choice for you might be the one that you initially think of as the least attractive possibility. Once the operation has been done, there is no going back. The question is what do you want to be?"

"Female," I said.

"Pardon, did I hear you correctly?"

"Female," I said. "I want to be female."

The doctor looked shocked for a moment, and then smiled. "That was the choice that I was going to recommend to you. The quickness of your decision made me think you had chosen the opposite. Would you care to explain the reasons for your choice?"

"The way I think... The way I feel... I'm an emotional and sensitive person. I thought I was male and I always felt that nature must have made a mistake. Now I feel like I am getting a second chance at life. As if nature were correcting its initial mistake. When the operation is done, I want you there to make sure they know what I want. I don't want them cutting out the wrong set of organs. You understand me, don't you?"

"Yes, of course," she said. "I promise I'll be there in the operating room. I'll make sure that you get what you want without any tragic mix-ups. You are sure, aren't you?"

"Absolutely," I said.

The doctor kept her word and was there when the operation was done. When I was back in the recovery ward, she came to see me. She had brought a hand mirror and some make-up. "I'm not really interested in that stuff," I said.

"It's just eyeliner and mascara," she said. "Let me show you how to use it."

"Okay," I said. The doctor proceeded to give me my first lesson in make-up. I slept more soundly that night than I could remember ever sleeping before.

End of Chapter 1

Chapter 2: "Identity"

On my last day in the hospital, the doctor, my doctor, came to me with both an offer and a promise. The offer was that I would receive free basic health care in return for allowing my medical history to be entered anonymously into medical research archives and medical textbooks. I agreed with two provisos: that I could break the agreement at any time for any reason or no reason without risk of legal retaliation, and that I would receive a monthly living stipend that was enough to pay for food and clothes. My doctor agreed immediately and signed for her colleagues at the medical research institute. The promise was to search the medical records for hermaphrodites who were fully functional as both sexes. Since there were so few, it should be possible to narrow my possible identities down to fewer than a dozen names. Medical privacy laws would make it impossible to delve deeply into the medical records of such persons, but enough information would be publicly available to determine who I wasn't. By the process of elimination, it might be possible to find my identity.

Upon leaving the hospital, I went straight to the homeless shelter to pick up my belongings. I was so addled by all that had happened that I walked in wearing the dark blue pleated dress that I had picked up at the free store. I walked straight to my locker and started to put my key in when I was stopped by a staff person. "You're in the wrong side. The women's section is in the adjacent side." I turned the key in the lock and swiftly removed my belongings before the staff person could stop me. "How on earth did you get a locker in here?" At that precise moment, the "wolf" that I had encountered earlier came rushing up: "Was I right?" I looked the "wolf" straight in the eye and said "Yes, you were." I asked him how brave he was because there were quite a few of the residents whom I recognized staring at us. "Brave enough, I guess. Why do you ask?" I gave him a quick kiss on the mouth and then dashed out to leave him with the task of explaining. I must admit that the kiss seemed strange as I had for so long thought that I was male. The idea of kissing a woman seemed more comfortable for me. I had the feeling that the psychological adjustments I needed to make would take a long time.

I walked over to the women's section and asked for a locker and a bed. I got a surprise. A new law had taken effect. You now had to show ID to stay in a homeless shelter. The intent was to keep illegal immigrants out of the homeless shelters and to keep tabs on homeless citizens who were coming to be regarded as potential terrorist threats. I had no ID and thus, like the illegal immigrants, was simply out of luck. There was no place left for me but the street. I couldn't legally rent an apartment. I couldn't open a bank account. I couldn't legally get a job. Speaking of jobs...

I walked down to the mom-and-pop pizza parlour I had been working at. My doctor had already contacted him and had explained my situation to him. She had prepared him psychologically for the shock of seeing me wearing a dress. The pizza parlour owner was sympathetic, but told me that he couldn't continue to employ me because my social security number did not exist. I had the social security number of a dead person. "How fitting," I thought. I walked out the front door of the pizza parlour and pondered where to go next. I had not the slightest clue.

I walked down the street to an old bus station bench. There hadn't been any buses in this city for years. Yet another sign of just how entrenched the "fend-for-yourself" mentality had become in this country. After just sitting and staring into space for awhile, an inspiration came out of nowhere to me: this city had once had plans for a subway system, and old uncompleted tunnels still existed underground. I knew where one of the tunnel entrances was said to be located. It was at least two miles away, but I had nothing better to do. I started walking.

In the meantime, I had become quite thirsty and wondered just how a homeless person with no money might get something to drink. I decided to be utterly brazen. I walked into a nearly deserted fast-food restaurant carrying my duffel bag and walked right up to the soft drink dispenser. In full view of the front counter, I took a paper cup and got some ice and water. I made eye contact with the employee, and he looked downwards and stared at the floor. Neither of us said a word. I walked out.

In an hour – or was it two? - I reached the entrance to the abandoned subway tunnel. The entrance was above ground and consisted of concrete walls perhaps fifteen feet high. Was that a sidewalk up above? I heard cars above and figured that a street ran over the top of the entrance. There was a paved path leading to the entrance and overgrown weeds lined the path. There was no one around. I walked up to the gloomy entrance and stared into the blackness. "Down the rabbit hole," I thought. I entered.

One step forward into the blackness and I instantly sensed that I was not alone. Dead silence. Not a rustle. I waited for my eyes to adjust. In the gloom ahead I noticed a faint yellow wash of sunshine filtering through an overhead ventilation grate. It wasn't much, but it was enough to see where I was going. Up ahead I noticed a staircase. Still not a soul in sight. I walked up to the staircase and peered down. Even darker. I took a few steps down and waited again for my eyes to adjust. A faint yellow-white glow from a distant ventilation grate overhead illuminated a subway platform. I continued down and noticed what appeared to be a public restroom. At the other end of the platform, I saw them. There were about 20 adults living down here in this refuge of last resort. No children. None of them moved. I walked up wondering if I would be chased out. No one moved. No one spoke. I suddenly realized that all of these people were for some reason afraid of me. What harm could I possibly do to them? Finally I asked if it was alright for me to stay down here as I had no where else to go. I said that I had expected to find the tunnel completely empty. Someone in the back whom I could not see very well spoke first: "You're as welcome to stay here as any of the rest of us. You will find that you cannot speak to half of the people here. Half of us speak Spanish only. The other half of us speak English only. You wouldn't happen to be bilingual would you?"

"I speak four languages. In order of ability, I speak English, French, Spanish, and finally Portuguese," I said. I noticed a sudden interest in his face.

"We've been praying for someone like you." A sense of great relief was visible in his face. I sensed that he was the unofficial leader of the group, and a reluctant one at that. I then addressed the Spanish speakers in their own language and let them know that they could come to me if they needed someone to translate. The same look of relief washed over their faces as well.

I asked about practicalities. Amazingly enough, the water was still connected to the faucets in the bathrooms. Praise the inefficiency of the eternal, indifferent Republican administrations. They had been cutting budgets for public services for over 30 years. No one thought to cut the water off to the abandoned subway tunnels where the bathrooms were used only by occasional maintenance workers. Several decades ago there had been regular inspections and maintenance work done down here as there was talk of restarting the subway system project. That all died in the 1980s when the new social darwinist order took hold. The residents here flushed the toilets by pouring a bucket of water down the commode. Food, however, was a different problem. This was a hungry, haggard looking bunch. They had been relying on dumpster diving for food. I saw no cooking equipment of any kind. Truth was, they all looked like they were slowly starving to death. I asked a stupid question: "Hasn't anyone here gone to one of the food banks?" Yes they had. The nearest one was miles from here. These people didn't look like they had the stamina to carry a bag of groceries for miles. Without a bus system, the nearest food bank might has well have been on Mars. Everyone here in the tunnels had decided to stay here because there was water, shelter, and access to functioning toilets. It was, in fact, a bit better than the shelters because there were no bureaucrats constantly monitoring everyone. I asked if there was any food available down here in the tunnel. No, there was nothing. If I wanted dinner, I would have to go dumpster diving myself. At least there was water. I went back up the stairs to scrounge for dinner.

One of the Spanish-speaking women followed me up the stairs and offered to lead me to her favorite places to scrounge. After a half-mile walk we were behind a shopping center. She led me to a dumpster behind a grocery store. It was starting to get dark and she seemed in a hurry. She reached behind the dumpster and pulled out a long pole. Up went the lid and she began sifting through the contents. We found several packages of cheese that had been discarded because they had visible mold. She looked irritated at the plastic packaging, but that was no problem. I pulled a pocket knife out of one of my dress pockets and cut open the packages. We peeled off the moldy parts and ate the rest. It wasn't exactly appetizing, but it was better than going hungry until the next day. We ate all the cheese that we found. There was no other edible food in the dumpsters behind the grocery store. She let me know that we had actually gotten lucky. Often there was nothing to be found. I looked my companion over in the twilight. She was even thinner than me. She had the look of an Indian and had a bony face with hollowed-out cheeks. She was short like me and looked like she weighed less than 90 pounds. I shuddered to think what she would look like a month later. I was suddenly very thankful that I had an appointment at the clinic every Saturday afternoon. The agreement I had negotiated included a payment for every time I showed up.

The rest of that week was a nightmare for all of us living in the subway tunnel. The pickings from dumpster diving were quite meager. I decided to make the long walk to the free store where I had originally picked up my dark blue pleated dress. I was hoping to pick up more dresses as I had only the one I was wearing. I was also hoping to get a halfway decent meal in a nearby soup kitchen run by the same church as the free store. I got lucky in the free store and found several petite-size dresses. They were all two or three sizes too large, but I wasn't in a position to be picky. I also found an old hunting knife and a leg holster for it. This was an unusual find and I could not resist taking it. I also took a meat cleaver just in case I ever learned to set rabbit snares and actually caught anything. I was a fish-eating vegetarian – I still am – but who knew what I might eat if I got hungry enough. I also found several small, brown medicine bottles with eyedroppers. I could use those for measuring chlorine bleach into bottles of water. In the nearby soup kitchen, a meal of rice, beans, and vegetables seemed like five-star restaurant fare compared to what I had been eating. I felt just a bit guilty as I imagined what my fellow tunnel dwellers were eating. I looked forward to my first weekly visit to the clinic because I would collect a $150 payment for each time I showed up. I planned on spending the first payment on a large two-burner propane gas camp stove and a canister of propane gas for the subway tunnel. It wasn't just for me. It was for everyone.

The next day I went into the woodlot near the tunnel entrance to practice knife throwing and discovered that I had a remarkable knack for it. My ability to hit an "X" carved onto a tree at twenty feet made me wonder if I had been a circus performer or possibly something far more sinister. I continued to practice stepping five feet farther back each time I could nail a target five times in a row. I got up to forty feet before I began to feel a challenge. I would have started using my knife on the plentiful rabbits in the surrounding area, but we had no way to cook the meat. Tomorrow was my meeting at the clinic. I had already picked out a camp stove at a nearby shopping center.

The next morning I set out on the long walk to the clinic. The air in the morning was a bit cooler and made the length of the trip more bearable. When I finally arrived at the clinic, I signed in at the front desk and promptly fell asleep in a chair. Even a chair was more comfortable than the tunnel floor that I had been sleeping on. None of us in the tunnel had any kind of bedding. I had been using my duffel bag as a pillow. I'm not sure how much time had passed when a nurse woke me up and ushered me in. At the clinic, everyone called me Tracy after the fake name that I had been using. My doctor led me in to an examining room and, after the briefest glance, said "They threw you out of the homeless shelter, didn't they?" The very first thing she did was have me strip and step on a scales. I had already dropped six pounds since I had left the hospital. At this rate I'd be dead in a month. I must admit that, at this point, the thought of death seemed more comforting than frightening. She did many more tests on me and took a blood sample as well. The overall prognosis was that I was in decent shape except for being underweight. She handed me the agreed upon $150 and then opened her purse for something else: "This was my birthday gift. It's good for $200 in that camping goods supply store. I know you can put it to better use than I can." I remember collapsing backwards into a chair as the tears came in great torrents. Hours later an employee woke me from a cot in a back room with the message, "Your cab has arrived, Miss." My doctor had arranged and paid for a cab ride for me back to wherever my "home" might be.

Back "home" at the tunnel I was greeted with the news that one of our group had died. The old woman who had been sick and who could barely move had, mercifully, finally passed away. No one seemed to know what to do. Call the police? I explained the facts to the rest of them: "The fact that she was living here is proof that she has no relatives who care for her. If we turn her over to the county officials, they will place her body in a refrigerated tray at the morgue until someone comes to claim her body. The only way she will get a funeral is if we give her one. We are her family now. Has anybody got a shovel?" No one did. A branch of the camping goods store to which my doctor had given me the gift certificate was located in one of the nearby shopping centers. I made my first purchase on that gift card: a shovel.

The mass expulsion of illegal immigrants and people without adequate identification from homeless shelters resulted in a huge increase in the number of people living on the street. Our little band in the abandoned subway tunnel soon increased to over 100 people. I had used the rest of my camping supplies gift card to purchase a large two-burner propane cook stove and a large cooking pot with a tight lid, and had spent the cash on propane gas cannisters, bulk bags of rice, vegetable oil, and salt. The rice didn't last long with such a large group. There simply wasn't enough food in the dumpsters surrounding the area to sustain us all. Starvation stared all of us in the face. Deep inside I felt something building that was unfamiliar to me: rage. I imagined myself as an avenging demon. Nightmares haunted my sleep. I realized that that meat cleaver I had found in the free store was fate. I knew what I would do with it.

The next morning I began practicing throwing the meat cleaver instead of my knife. It was much heavier and harder to throw, but I gradually built up both accuracy and distance. Two days later I aimed at an old, rotten branch and managed to hit it hard enough to bring it down. I moved on to the next step in the plan which I have still not mentioned: I walked down the creek bed nearby searching for a large, corporate-owned grocery store. About one mile down the creek bed in the opposite direction from the shopping center where we usually scavenged, I found one. I went inside and familiarized myself with the layout of the goods taking special note of where duffel bags were in the camping section and rice and beans were in the dry staples section. I also made note of where the chocolate was as the highly concentrated calories of chocolate could be a life-saver to those too emaciated and weak to move. We had a few people like that in the tunnel. I wondered how long it would be before I needed to use my shovel again.

That evening I broached my plan to a selected group of men and women who were still in relatively good physical condition. I suggested that we take a group of 30 people down the creek bed to a large grocery store located about a mile away in the middle of the night. Half of us would wait in the creek bed and the other half would break into the grocery store through a broken window, grab duffel bags from the camping section, fill the bags with rice, beans, and chocolate, and then dash back out to the creek bed where the other 15 waited. We would take turns carrying our loot and would run all the way back to the subway tunnel. I said that I would be the one to break the glass and would be the first to enter and the first to leave. They all looked at each other horrified by my suggestion. I said that I only wanted them to consider the suggestion and that I would leave them to discuss the matter among themselves. I went outside and climbed twenty feet up a tree where I had hidden a small zip-locked bag of chocolate bars that I had bought at the same time I had purchased rice. I polished off three of the 3.5-ounce bars in rapid succession and still felt hungry. I decided to stop at three as the last thing I needed was to get nauseated and throw anything up. I hoped that the two plastic bags would continue to conceal the smell from animals. I did not dare bring the bars down into the tunnels as I did not have enough to share. The next day I had to get out my shovel. That is when the others agreed to my plan.

I took the selected 30 to a distant part of the tunnel where the only lighting was candlelight, and gave the details of my plan. In the middle of the night, when the grocery store had only a few stockers and security guards inside, we would travel down the creek bed to the store. Half of us would stay at the creek bed and wait. Half would go to the parking lot for the break-in. I chose the members of each group at that point. The members waiting in the creek bed were there to assist with the carrying of the loot to allow alternation of carrying so that no one would be carrying something the entire way back to the tunnel. Of the 15 in the parking lot, two would be lookouts who would dash up to the front store window to peer inside and make sure that no employees were near enough to the window to get hurt by flying glass. I chose those two at that point. The other 12 were to wait behind me in the parking lot. When the two lookouts gave the "all clear" signal, a thumbs up gesture, they would dash back into the parking lot behind me with the other 12. I did not want anyone in front of me or even near me when I threw the meat cleaver at the window as I thought that it was always possible for me to make a bad throw or even slip. I held up the meat cleaver and asked everyone to imagine it hitting them in the chest. Everyone appeared to agree on the need to keep their distance from me when I threw the meat cleaver. I explained that the window probably was rigged with an alarm which would go off the instant it was broken. I needed to break it with one throw. When the window was broken, the two lookouts and I would head straight for the camping goods section to where the duffel bags were kept. We would toss duffel bags to the 12 who would run by and head straight to the dry staples section to grab bags of rice, beans, pasta, and dehydrated soup. The two lookouts would head to the cooking supplies aisle and grab bottles of vegetable oil and containers of salt. I kept the best job for myself: I would run to the candy aisle and dump as many bars of chocolate as would fit into my duffel bag. I explained that the highly concentrated calories of chocolate could be a lifesaver for those of us who were very sick and weak. The total time we could stay in the store needed to stay under two minutes. It was very important to get in and out quick. We wanted to be halfway to the tunnel at least before the police arrived. It was also important that we stay in the creek bed in the water to make it difficult for bloodhounds to track us by scent. "Pretend we're the foxes and the police are the humans with dogs." Everyone agreed to the plan and seemed impressed with the level of detail. Then I drew on the wall a diagram of the store layout with a stub of chalk that I had found in my duffel bag. The dry staples section was straight back from the front window – easy to find. The duffel bags were in the camping goods section to the right of the store. The candy aisle was conveniently located one aisle behind the dry staples. I encouraged anyone who managed to fill his/her duffel bag quickly with dry staples to raid the chocolate supply as well. The raid was to take place that night. I switched into my old men's clothing for what was to be the last time in my life.

Night came all too soon for some of us. We walked silently and slowly down the half-moonlit creek bed toward the store, conserving our energy for the mad dash back to the tunnel. We took about a half hour to reach the area adjacent to the targeted grocery store. Half of our group simply sat on the bank to wait and the other half of us ran up to the parking lot. "Two minutes!" I reminded my band of 15. My two lookouts dashed up to the front window, gave the all-clear signal, and dashed back behind me. I pulled back the meat cleaver, took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and let fly. I opened my eyes and was greeted by an ear-splitting crash as a thousand shards of glass flew through the air reflecting the seven colors of the rainbow in an hallucinogenic display of light. The shards of glass dropped to the pavement like the white petals of a crab apple tree caught in a storm. The continuous wail of an alarm assaulted our ears. I jumped through the gap first, and everything became a blur. Everything executed as a finely conceived NFL football play, and in only a moment, our bags were full. Out we went. I grabbed the meat cleaver on the way out, and we were back at the creek bed in what must surely have been less than three minutes. A security guard and three stockers had watched the entire spectacle from a distance, but had made no effort to intervene. We passed our loot to the waiting fifteen and ran straight down the center of the creek bed. At the one-third point the loot was passed back again. I pressed everyone to keep running as I felt we would not be safe even temporarily until we were back in the abandoned tunnels. Such criminals we were!

As soon as we arrived at the tunnels, we discovered that those left behind had already moved everything back farther, much farther, into the tunnels. They had moved us into another station that had no opening to the surface and only one ventilation shaft opening to the surface to admit air and a faint, silvery glow of the half moon overhead. It was enough to breathe. It was enough to see. It was no more. Mercifully, there was a functioning restroom here as well. We would not have to travel back and forth for water and toilets. This station had ancient artwork on the walls. Candles inside glass jars burned in several locations casting cross-secting shadows against the bare cement of the track tunnel.

We spent the next few days utterly paranoid, convinced that the police would show up and haul us all off to prison. Nothing happened. Newspapers that we found lying around had no mention of the robbery. It was as if nothing at all had happened. Deep down inside, I had the feeling that this was a bad sign.

Needless to say, food suddenly was not a problem, and for the next few days we ate like starving wolves. All things considered, we were starving wolves. On Saturday I walked to my clinic appointment in the morning as I had done last week. My doctor looked startled when she saw me: "I had expected you to walk in here looking like an emergency room case." She did all the usual tests and then made me strip to step on the scales. "You're up two pounds. How'd you manage that in one week?" I didn't answer and was suddenly thankful that news of the robbery had not shown up in the newspaper. My doctor was definitely smart enough to put two and two together. She then gave me a lecture about being underweight and handed me the $150 as agreed upon. I asked what all the tests were for. "The data is being recorded as a case study in delayed puberty. You haven't gone through puberty yet even though you're an adult. You know, of course, all the things that happen during puberty." I thought for a moment, and then asked my doctor a question of earth-shattering import: "Am I gonna get a face full of zits?"

Then my doctor gave me the news that I thought I'd never hear. "I found someone who knows your identity. Your data is contained within local police files, but the police department won't release it because of both department policy and privacy laws. In order to get your files, you have to sign for them. It's a catch-22 situation: you can't sign for your files unless you know who you are, and you can't find out who you are without the files. You also don't have any ID to prove who you are. Just being alive is not enough. You're not a criminal is all they would say. I'm going to see if I can get an ACLU lawyer to take on your case. Your identity is your property. There is no human right more basic than that."

The next week was positively surreal. All of us down in the tunnels returned to our previous habits of dumpster diving and traveling to free stores to obtain essential items. We expected the police to show up in force at any moment, but nothing happened. The newspapers continued to contain not the slightest mention of the grocery store robbery. In the tunnels, we discovered a new problem to worry about and began luring feral cats down into the tunnels with some success. We all agreed that the feral cats, uncuddly as they were, were infinitely preferable to that other type of furry creature that had started showing up in the tunnels as soon as a food source showed up.

With the passing of another week, I made my routine trip to the clinic and endured all the usual tests and the now-hated weigh-in that concluded each visit. After giving me the $150, my doctor informed me that an ACLU lawyer was now working on my case, and believed that he had a good chance of prying loose the coveted files at the police department.

When I had reached the tunnels again later that day, one of the two men who had been a lookout for me at the robbery reported that a police officer had been following him the entire day. I figured that arrest was imminent and that there wasn't much we could do about it. In the middle of the night it came. We awoke in the tunnel to dozens of bright flood lights shining in our faces. We were utterly blinded. We were led out of the tunnels one-by-one by men in military-style uniforms and armed with machine guns. All of our group were taken to a high-security prison in the local area and charged with terrorism. The U.S. news media ignored our story, but fortunately a BBC reporter had gotten wind of what had happened and scraped together the story in tiny little pieces from here and there. It was all over the press in foreign countries, but there seemed to be a news blackout in the U.S. concerning our arrest. My doctor, being a paranoid sort who did not trust the U.S. news media or government, had been getting her news from foreign sources via the internet and foreign television stations for years. When she discovered that a large group of homeless people in her area had been arrested for stealing food, she knew what group had been arrested: you see, I had been up two pounds again at my last visit as well. It was an easy deduction for my doctor to make.

Once the BBC publicized the story in the international news media, it became impossible for the U.S. news media to ignore the story. For the time being, we were held in the local prison under the jurisdiction of the local police department as the federal government and local authorities wrangled over the question of whether we terrorists or just thieves. The federal government, including President Jeb Bush, claimed we were "enemy combatants" who should be held in Guantanamo. The reasoning was that the robbery was a "mob action" and thus qualified as terrorism under the Patriot Act. Nearly everyone else disagreed with that reasoning. The press in nearly all foreign countries made a cause celebre of us and proclaimed us a band of modern Jean Valjeans. As the story became better known in the U.S., copycat robberies began occurring in scattered locations across the country. Within a week, grocery store sackings by homeless people spread across the nation and events spiraled out out of control. Twelve days after our arrest, President Jeb Bush declared martial law nationwide and federalized all national guard units and police departments. The national guard and the police were patrolling the streets with orders to shoot looters on sight.

My doctor showed up to visit me at the prison and informed me that my ACLU lawyer had been successful in prying loose my files from the police department. I had been an employee of the police department. She handed me my personnel file with an intensely worried look on her face. I had been an undercover narcotics cop. My small size was a great advantage as no one ever suspected that such a small person might be a cop. I had arrested numerous persons for marijuana charges and was responsible for many nonviolent drug offenders going to prison for long terms. My name was Daniel Alice Shays, and this Daniel was a monster - a mindless enforcer of the corporate order. As I thought of the cruelties and pain I had inflicted, the tears began to roll. I was horrified at what I had been. I was evil. I was a robot with no compassion. The last page of my personnel file was a psychologist's report. I had begun to doubt the morality of my job. The last straw had been when I had received news that a teenager I had arrested for growing several marijuana plants in his bedroom had been convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison without possibility of parole. I had slammed my badge down on the police captain's desk, taken out my gun and unloaded it, slammed the gun down, poured the bullets down like rain, and proceeded to undress myself down to just shoes and underwear before running out the front door of the police station into the night. Other police officers had followed me out the front door, but I had simply vanished.

A BBC reporter came to interview me about the recent events I had been involved in, and to ask me about Daniel. I gave the reporter this reply: "Daniel was a monster who mindlessly followed orders and inflicted a great deal of pain for no reason other than that it was his job. May God forgive me for the things I did when I was Daniel. I am truly sorry. I am not Daniel anymore. My name is Tracy Smith, and I do not exist."

The End

This story is entirely original, and is entirely mine. -Nikki Little


	4. The Eye of a Needle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A small restaurant owner wakes up one morning to find that at least 95 percent of the world's population has disappeared. It's not the Rapture.

The Eye of a Needle

by Nikki Little

 

It is by a most curious happening that I find myself here. Perhaps I should start at the beginning. I was a small restaurant owner and was quite successful. Oh, I know what you're thinking, but it wasn't really like that at all. I was not your typical slave driver that is so common in the restaurant industry. I ran a small, upscale cafe that catered to the business class -- people who could afford to pay high prices. I had extremely high food safety standards, and disposed of everything past its expiration date. I paid my employees well -- a living wage in an industry marked by minimum wage and high turnover. I wasted nothing. Instead of throwing food about to expire into the dumpster, I cleaned out my walk-in of food about to expire every Sunday at around 10:00 P.M and had my employees prepare it. Every Sunday one of them, or me, took the prepared food to the local homeless shelter which, I'm sure you know, was absurdly overcrowded because our economy had simply ceased to function for ordinary people. It was at one of my trips to that local homeless shelter that I first met him. Tall with a long, white beard and a majestic bearing that seemed incongruous in a homeless shelter. He was obviously well-educated and sounded like a philosopher on those few occasions that I spoke to him. His message to me at every meeting was the same: “A day of reckoning is coming. People like these, the last of the earth, shall be first. The privileged, who are used to standing in line for nothing, shall be last in everything. Always be kind to the nobodies, for you never know who is watching.” He seemed to take a liking to me, and gave me repeated warnings that “you can't buy your way into heaven.” I thought he was just another religious fanatic, and politely endured his ravings.

On my last trip to the homeless shelter to give away food that was about to expire, he warned me, “The day has come. Tomorrow morn there will much rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth. The wicked will reap the fruits of their self-absorption.” The next day was just as he said. All the wretched of the earth -- the entire planet -- and the many of the struggling middle class who were just able to maintain their dignity -- were gone. The streets were eerily empty as I walked toward the front door of my restaurant. I found none of my employees in the kitchen getting things ready to open the doors in one hour. Because of the eerie quiet in the streets, I was not particularly upset as I hung a sign on the front door of my business “Temporarily closed. Please come again soon.” I discovered a gathering a people on the front lawn of the town's courthouse and joined them. They were mostly business people and professionals. They all reported the same thing as I had experienced. None of their employees had shown up. In fact, no one's employees could be found anywhere. The town's mayor was standing at the top of the courthouse steps and shouted for everyone's attention. He informed us that only a handful of the town's utility employees were still around, and that the work that used to be done by ordinary people would have to be done by us. A long time ago, I had taken training in water and wastewater treatment plant operation and told the utilities manager that I would be glad to help out in the town's treatment plants as best I could. I was the only person that day who volunteered to do that work that makes our technology-dependent lives work. The rest of the business people and professionals thought that they were above such work. 

It didn't take long for the economy as we all had once known it to simply disappear. The rebellion started with the farmers who refused to accept government currency in return for food. It wasn't long before government currency became irrelevant. There were so few people left that we simply broke open the doors of abandoned shops and took what we needed. There were no law enforcement officers of any type. The jails were empty. There were only judges -- who had no one to judge, and lawyers who had no one to defend -- or gouge. It didn't take long for electricity to fail in many parts of the town as the few utility supervisors struggled to maintain any service at all. I helped out at the town's treatment plants, and with the help of the supervisor, we put the town's ancient slow-sand filters back into use because our supply of chemicals that is used in the normal, highly technical water treatment systems was running out. We bypassed all the complicated technical wastewater treatments and ran what little wastewater was coming in to the town's old wastewater ponds. The town's supply of electricity was sharply curtailed and limited to the downtown area. We found local sources of coal and burned that instead of trucked-in oil. Everything became local in nature and we had to learn to be self-sufficient. The television stations, the radio stations, the newspapers, the telephones, the cell phones, the internet,...all went silent as people abandoned those things that had once seemed so important for the more mundane matters of simply feeding themselves and finding water. Cash blew in the streets like old newspapers. My old cafe became a sort of communal kitchen. Everywhere you looked, life seemed to revert to the patterns of the 1800s.

Our favorite pastime became speculating on what had happened. Some claimed it was “The Rapture.” However, that phenomenon was supposed to be the departure of only the righteous. What had actually happened was the departure of all the non-privileged. Murderers, child rapists, career criminals had all disappeared. I posited the theory that we were being tested. Having spent our entire lives in the pursuit of an abstraction that now had no value at all, we had to learn to be useful. We had to learn to take care of each other. My fellow business owners of the Chamber of Commerce crowd scoffed at my naiveté. “Women in business! Too soft-hearted to ever be anything but small-time!” It did no good to point out that the world appeared to have little use now for the profit motive. 

One evening I walked over to the now-empty homeless shelter and wondered at the irony: the homeless would have no trouble now finding a place to live. Locks had become irrelevant. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shadow in the shelter's make-shift cafeteria. It was my old acquaintance at the homeless shelter, the majestic fellow that I had nicknamed “Plato.” I asked him why it was that he seemed to be the only poor person who hadn't disappeared. “I am back for a second gathering of souls,” he said. “I have played many roles in your history. I was Moses in the times of the Old Testament. I was Spartacus in the days of the Roman Empire. I was Gandhi in India. I was John Brown in the days before your Civil War. I was Salvador Allende in Chile. I have grown weary of fighting the same battles over and over again. Most people seem to be unable to learn the most basic lesson of life -- one that should be learned as a small child: share your toys. That's it. That's all people had to do. It's time to tear everything down and start again. The little people have already been judged. The privileged of the world, such as yourself, were given a chance to prove their basic humanity in a test of their character. In a world where all the old rules had been swept away, could people learn to work together and share their abilities and possessions for betterment of all? When you volunteered to work in the town's treatment plants and opened your old restaurant as a communal kitchen, you saved your own soul. You became useful to someone other than yourself. Miracles do happen, it seems. Come. It is time to leave. One-by-one, I and other souls like me are scavenging the world for the salvageable. Those who passed the test will join the others in their eternity. Those who failed, which is most, will be left with no one at all to do any work for them. They will work or they will die of thirst, hunger, or exposure -- whichever comes first.”

He pointed to a shimmering mirage on the wall of the homeless shelter and beckoned me. I asked for a moment and am now banging away on an old manual typewriter. I feel the need to leave some explanation behind. The mirage on the wall pulsates and looks like a mountain range. At the center I see a spire which looks like the eye of a needle.

 

The End

 

This story is completely original, and is entirely mine. --Nikki Little


	5. What You Reap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A purchasing agent for Cheap-Mart unwittingly unleashes a plague in the United States.

What You Reap

by Nikki Little

 

I hate my job. I hate my fucking job. Now you might wonder what I do that makes me say that. Perhaps your first thought is that I'm a burned-out teacher. I was a teacher. Once. I quit that for good reason only to land in something equally bad. Sometimes I wonder why I don't just shoot myself and get this fucking life over with. Seriously. I hate to wake up in the morning. What is my problem? It's that I have come to wonder if there is any way to make a living that does not involve flushing your soul down the toilet. Is there any way to make a living that does not involve either being a human doormat for everyone to piss on, or being a vampire that sucks the blood out of everything it sees? Must I choose between being a victim or a victimizer in order to earn a living? It seems that indeed I must make that choice because no third option exists. There is no honest way to make a living.

I buy clothes for a living. I'm a purchasing agent. My job is to scour the globe and find the cheapest “sourcing” for the production of Cheap-Mart's store brand of clothes. All of Cheap-Mart's store brand of clothes are aimed at the poorest sector of the American clothes market which nowadays is just about everyone who isn't rich. The primary facet of my job is to get a bunch of third-world factory owners into a single conference hall and pit them in a bidding war against each other. Low bidder gets the contract and wins the great privilege of making clothes for Cheap-Mart. God help the winner. I close my eyes every single day I do this fucking job. I've been looking for an alternative for two years, but can't find anything that doesn't involve saying “Hello, my name is Renee and I'll be your waitress this evening.” Yeah, that's a living alright. I'd be lucky to pay the rent, utilities, and gas with a waitress' earnings. I'm stuck. I'm screwed. I'm totally fucked. I hate my life.

My last assignment was to find a “source” for a new line of no-frills dresses for women whose only real option is the faded near rags that you find nowadays in the charity shops. When you consider that there is virtually no middle class in the U.S. these days, the charities just don't get what they used to. The middle class these days ARE the working poor. Anyway, I did my job. I went to Central America and did my usual fuck-over job of pitting a bunch of small, local factory owners who are far from rich themselves against each other in the usual bidding war. The low bidder was obviously desperate. Usually the low bidder is a representative of some state-owned factory in China. They're almost always the low bidder as nobody, not even the sweatshop owners in places as poor as Nicaragua, The Dominican Republic, and Jamaica can compete with the institutionalized slave labor of China. This time, however, the low bidder was a factory owner in Jamaica. He was clearly desperate, and I followed my policy manual of not asking questions about how he planned to do it. Cheap-Mart made a great show of sending out inspectors to investigate working conditions in the factories to ensure humane working conditions as a sop to the fake liberals in the Democratic Party who just wanted some window dressing to cover up their complicity in the great global race to the bottom on working conditions. Of course the factory owners always got advance notice of an inspection. A soulless, immoral bastard. That's me. Why hasn't God struck me dead?

What is the great crime that I committed? Why do I have a death wish? If you knew what I had done, you would shoot me yourself. I did not know what I had done until after I had done it. I unleashed the whirlwind upon the United States. The factory owner in Jamaica was desperate because a new form of tuberculosis that was resistant to all known antibiotics had appeared on the island. His factory was considered a purveyor of death in Jamaica as all of his doomed employees were sick with the new strain. There was no cure. Clothes made by his employees were sanitized according to Cheap-Mart company regulations before being packaged and thus I did not worry about the prospect of spreading disease with clothes manufactured in third-world hellholes. This new strain of tuberculosis, however, was more virulent than anything ever seen before. Catching it was a slow-motion death sentence. Once you started to show symptoms, you had about three months to live. Cheap-Mart's sanitization procedure did not eliminate the new tuberculosis strain from clothes that had been coughed on. All of the dresses from the factory were infected and all became hanging death traps in Cheap-Mart stores. I didn't know. None of us knew.

The new strain of tuberculosis spread quickly in the United States, and the government's first inclination was the usual: blame illegal immigrants. The U.S. government set up concentration camps for illegal immigrants and began scouring the entire country rounding them up for high-security incarceration. Of course the illegal immigrants often wore Cheap-Mart clothes, and some of the women were wearing the infected dresses from Jamaica. The concentration camps became the equivalent of Hitler's gas chambers. Once you were incarcerated in one of the overcrowded camps, it was only a matter of time before you became infected from the original source of a Jamaican Cheap-Mart dress. The illegals in the camps died by the millions. The infection spread into the general population of the U.S. and, since we don't have any national health program, people who became sick often sought no treatment. Instead, they usually attempted to hide their illness as a single cough in public was sometimes enough to land someone in a quarantine camp, so great was the paranoia. The rest of the world embargoed the United States and refused entry to our citizens. No one seemed to have the faintest idea where the infection had originally come from. I learned the truth because I was in Jamaica at the time trying to arrange for the production of more of the deadly dresses for Cheap-Mart. Have I been rambling incoherently? I hope you'll forgive me. I'm feeling a bit stressed.

When I went to the factory with my purchase order, I found the factory closed and Cuban government health inspectors were scouring the place. The Cubans had pieced together the mystery and had traced the original source of the new strain of tuberculosis to one employee at the factory. Ground zero. Every single employee in the factory and the owner himself had become infected. The Cubans all wore biohazard suits and the factory itself had been fenced in. Government cars, trucks, and make-shift lab equipment were everywhere. The clothes from the factory had become the vector for the spread of the disease. Cheap-Mart's unending commitment to finding the cheapest “source” for the production of all their products had become the undoing of what was once the world's wealthiest nation. And one naive schmuck doing her job--me-- had unleashed the horror. 

I went straight to an internet cafe in Kingston and posted my story on as many news blogs as I could. I also posted a video telling my story while showing my face on YouTube. A friend of the factory owner has told me that local thugs hired by agents of Cheap-Mart are looking for me with a contract on my head. I intend to do nothing to escape them. Here I sit on a park bench in Kingston scribbling away and awaiting my fate. I have nothing to lose. Cough.

 

The End

This story is completely original and is entirely mine. --Nikki Little


	6. Tracy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two minimum-wage workers in a pizza parlour find a second chance for love. There's a catch, however...

Title: Tracy  
Category: TV Shows » Twilight Zone  
Author: nikkilittle  
Language: English, Rating: Rated: T  
Genre: Fantasy/Romance  
Published: 05-10-13, Updated: 05-11-13  
Chapters: 6, Words: 4,194  
Chapter 1: Chapter 1

Chapter 1: "Prelude"

After 25 years of wondering, I had finally found her. Tracy was standing at the center of a high bridge over a river flowing through the western part of the town I had once worked in. It was an old-fashioned bridge with a rather narrow sidewalk on one side. The concrete railing came up maybe three-and-a-half-feet high. The masonry on the bridge was in bad shape and was crumbling. Tracy was leaning on the concrete railing and looking down over the edge. This made me nervous. She appeared not to have noticed me yet.

"I don't think I'd lean on that railing," I said. "It doesn't look trustworthy."

Tracy turned her head and looked at me registering no surprise at all. "Lewis, after all these years. You do recognize me, don't you?"

"Of course, you're Tracy. How could I forget? You're definitely the prettiest teen-aged girl that I have ever seen. I used to wish that you were a few years older."

Tracy smirked at me. "I knew that. I kept expecting you to ask me for a date, but you never did. You thought that I was too young for you. I was 17 and you were 28. There was also the difference in education. You had two college degrees which were proving to be pretty much useless, and I was a girl who would just barely graduate high school. I used to wonder if I was too dumb for you."

"You weren't dumb, Tracy. Education and intelligence are two entirely different things."

Tracy turned to face me. "Are you disappointed with what you see? I'm definitely not the hottie I used to be. Three kids did this to me. Every time I held up one of my panties, I couldn't believe how big it was. I got old and fat quick."

Tracy was quite short, maybe five feet one. Twenty-five years ago, she had been quite slim with narrow hips and a tiny backside. Her breasts had struck me as somewhat disproportionately large compared to the rest of her body. They were probably only C-cups, but she was so short and so tiny that they seemed huge. She was way too poor to have implants, so the high school boys used to whisper about her wearing "falsies."

One day her ride didn't arrive to pick her up, and I took her home. Her mother greeted me at the door, and it didn't take me long to figure out that Tracy and her mother were the only inhabitants of the home. She had no father. That sure explained some things. Tracy went into her bedroom to change out of her uniform leaving me sitting on an old, worn-out sofa with her bedraggled-looking mother. I had changed into street clothes in the restaurant's restroom. I hated to be seen in public in my uniform. Tracy's mother looked me over with interest, but kept quiet except to offer me a glass of water.

Tracy came out wearing a tight tank top and tight-fitting worn-out blue jeans. I realized that she was wearing those jeans mainly because she couldn't afford to go out and buy new ones. I wondered how much of Tracy's meager paycheck went to pay for necessities. The tight tank top with a plunging neckline made it abundantly clear that her breasts were real. I suddenly realized why she was so popular with the high school boys working in the restaurant, and why her breasts were the topic of so much speculation. Suddenly I felt a bit uncomfortable as I realized that Tracy might be showing off her "wares" to me. Tracy had a camera and wanted me to take photographs of her. I shot a roll of one dozen, and she took the film out of the camera and handed it to me. "Get two sets of prints and keep one for yourself. I want you to have something to remember me by." I still have the photos. I had also scanned them into my computer and had burned back-up disks to make sure that I never lost them. Every time I looked at them, I was astounded at how pretty her face was. All those freckles.

"Are you disappointed with what you see?" Tracy repeated. I snapped out of my reverie and stepped back to look her up and down. Now Tracy would be about 42. She looked 35. She had grown rather plump and matronly. Three kids will do that to even the skinniest young women. She was wearing an empire-waisted dress which showcased her breasts. They were big, round, and prominent with a lot of jiggle as she moved. Tracy was obviously still proud of her breasts. Her hips and backside were both full and rounded and had caught up with her chest. I suspect that didn't bother Tracy. She had a rounded, chubby belly that stuck out noticeably below her breasts. I'll bet that did bother Tracy. I guessed her weight at around 170. I thought she looked cute in the way that chubby women often do. She had nice curves. No denying that.

"You look just as good to me now as you did twenty-five years ago. I guess I'm just a sucker for a pretty face." I wasn't lying. The weight that she had gained had given her a heart-shaped baby face that was delicately framed by her medium-length reddish-blond hair. She had a butterfly mask of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Tracy had aged well. I saw no lines or wrinkles anywhere on her face. I started to think that getting plump may have been a blessing for Tracy.

Tracy looked at me in surprise. "You still think I'm beautiful, don't you? I'm fat and dumpy and you don't care!"

"I still think you're beautiful. Look in the mirror at your face. There's not a line anywhere. You're ageless." I was overjoyed to find her on that bridge.

"That's what I always liked about you! You always kept your eyes glued on my face while all the high school boys stared at my chest. So why don't you kiss me? I'm not married. Not anymore."

I hadn't noticed that strange moment when Tracy referred to herself in the past tense while talking about the size of her panties.

End of Chapter 1

Chapter 2: Chapter 2

Chapter 2: "Memories"

I was a prep cook in the restaurant that Tracy and I worked in, and I had to come in four hours before the doors opened for lunch. I usually left around two o'clock. Tracy was an after-school employee and came in usually around five. I had been working in the pizza parlour for several months without ever seeing her. I had heard stories, though.

Most of the stories centered around the question of the authenticity of her breasts. I had the image of Tracy as someone like the infamous Barbara of my junior high school days. Barbara had a fairly normal-looking figure except for her breasts. They were as big as footballs and stuck straight out. They looked like something out of the twilight zone. The first time I saw her in the seventh grade, she nearly knocked me over with them in an aisle in the school library. Barbara had a face like an iguana. I figured Tracy was Barbara with freckles.

I never saw Tracy until the summer of 1987 when she started coming in to work the lunch shift. I didn't recognize her when I saw her the first time and just assumed she was a new waitress until I saw her name tag. The tag was sitting on top of her left breast. This was the infamous Tracy? The blond with the enormous tits? She looked perfectly normal to me. She had the face of an angel. I was expecting an ugly girl with football-sized breasts. What a surprise!

"You're Tracy?" I stammered. "You sure aren't what I expected."

"You must be Lewis," Tracy answered without bothering to look at my nametag. "I've heard about you."

"Nothing horrible, I hope," I said. Tracy eyed me with obvious curiosity.

"Nope, nothing bad at all. You're one of two college grads working here as an hourly employee. I hope you escape from this place sometime soon. I'll probably be stuck working in places like this my whole life."

In spite of her sour comment, I soon saw Tracy as the live wire of the restaurant. Mischievous, carefree, and relentlessly cheerful in spite of her awareness of being trapped, Tracy was sort of like the restaurant's pet. Management loved her. She had more warnings in her personnel file than any of us, and the managers kept writing her up, but the unit manager refused to fire her even though she had triple the number of warnings that were supposed to trigger a termination.

I think the unit manager kept her around because she kept everybody amused. One day she was struggling with the lid of a canister of salad dressing and the lid suddenly popped free. Tracy was soaked in Italian salad dressing from head to foot. A waiter walked by and wryly observed that the salad dressing looked like semen and that Tracy just seemed to always have that effect on men.

Another day Tracy got drafted to crawl into the dishwasher and remove something that was clogging the drain. She was the only employee small enough to fit in the dishwasher. Tracy dutifully crawled in and removed the offending clog. She couldn't get out. The manager came back from his usual outpost in the dining room buried in paperwork. He wanted to know what the problem was.

"MY TITS ARE CAUGHT IN THE FUCKING RACK!"

It took awhile, but we did finally extract Tracy from the dishwasher. When she got loose, she pulled her uniform shirt down, and tucked the tail in. Suddenly the size of her breasts became obvious as she had pulled her uniform tight down over them. I made the mistake of staring.

Tracy looked at me with an amused expression on her face. "Well, well, Mr. Blind-As-A-Bat finally noticed. Yes, I do have big tits. However you certainly never had a chance to notice. You've had your eyes glued on my face since you first saw me." Tracy walked up to me very close and moved her face right in mine blocking my view of everything else.

"Am I that pretty?" Tracy asked.

"Yes, you are," I said. I didn't hesitate to reply.

"You're just about the only one who thinks so," said Tracy. "Everybody else just stares at my chest. You, however, are welcome to stare at my chest anytime you like." Tracy turned sideways a bit, threw her chest out, and winked at me.

When I think back to those days, I now see that Tracy liked me and was dropping hints left and right for a date. I never asked. She was 17. She was a minor. I was 28. I was an adult. She was carefree and mischievous. I was an intellectual worrywart. We were The Owl and the Pussycat. It was hopeless. I never asked Tracy for a date. I never dreamed that she would have accepted if I had asked. Now, looking backward, I am sure she would have. Tracy liked me. Maybe even loved me.

How could I have been so oblivious?

End of Chapter 2

Chapter 3: Chapter 3

Chapter 3: "Mirage"

I stepped forward to kiss Tracy, something I'd never done before, and passed right through her. I stepped backward and could see right through her. Another two steps backward, and she became opaque.

"Most people have run screaming long before they get within six feet of me." Tracy, or whatever she was, looked at me with a curious mixture of pity and affection.

I stepped forward toward Tracy and she once again turned transparent. Another two steps and I passed through her. The love of my life was a mirage.

Tracy looked over the side of the bridge. "I jumped in 2010. I stupidly expected to die when I hit the water. Instead I was stunned when I hit. The current carried me downstream and stuck me under that giant tree that fell into the river. Look to your left. You can see it from here. I'm stuck in the branches underneath the tree just a few feet from the surface. Don't get any ideas about informing the police. I guarantee you that they'll slap handcuffs on you and charge you with murder. Just leave me down there. It doesn't matter anyway. I wanted to disappear."

"Why?"

"You'd be amazed at how fast a life can unravel. My mother kept nagging me to get married. She said I couldn't live with her forever. I couldn't earn enough to make a living for myself from restaurant jobs and didn't see any choice. I married a construction worker just to have a roof over my head. I was a trophy to impress his friends. I always used birth control except for when he raped me. That's right. My husband raped me. Sometimes he wouldn't give me time to apply spermicide and he'd throw the condom in my face. After three kids, he lost interest in sex. I was too fat, he said. Then he lost his job in the budget cuts of 2009. He was a local government employee. With three kids, I couldn't work and it was impossible to save money. It only took a couple of months for us to get evicted from our apartment. He packed up and disappeared with the car while I had the kids at a park within walking distance. My mother had sold her house and moved into a small four-room cottage. She didn't have room for three kids. One night in a homeless shelter and child protection services showed up and took my kids from me. They said I could have them back when I became a responsible adult who could provide them with a home. Ever try to cover all basic necessities from a minimum-wage paycheck?"

Tracy paused in her monologue. There was no pain at all in her voice. There was anger. Full-throated fury.

"After five weeks in a homeless shelter and getting insulted in job interview after job interview I just gave up. My last interviewer sat behind his desk, leaned back, clasped his hands behind his neck, stuck his nose up in the air, and asked me why he should hire a girl who barely graduated high school when he could get a college graduate for the same wage. This was for a minimum-wage job in a department store. I wondered why he bothered to call me in for an interview. Was he too lazy to look at my application before he scheduled interviews? Did the smug bastard just call me in so he could insult me? I had a sharp pair of scissors in my purse. I actually thought about jumping on the desk and stabbing that bastard in the neck with the scissors. I had walked to that interview. I didn't have a car. You know there's no bus system. It was a mile and a half. I had walked a mile and a half to get insulted. That's a long walk for a fat girl. I wish I had stabbed that bastard. I walked out of the interview. When I got to this bridge on the way to the shelter, I looked over the side. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I jumped over the side without any hesitation. I had had enough of life. I hated everything. I hated everyone. I hated this country. I couldn't take anymore. Most people regret their decision immediately after they jump. I didn't. I only regretted that I didn't kill that bastard in that last interview. I'd haunt that fucker if I could."

"I'm sorry you had to suffer through all that. This country has been awash in similar stories since the great crash in 2007. It's another Great Depression, but the politicians won't admit it. It's 2013 now if you're wondering, and nothing has changed. You didn't miss anything."

"Sorry about the kiss," said Tracy. "I'd kiss you if I could."

"Yeah, I'm kind of disappointed. I waited 25 years for that kiss."

"I should have married you. You would have had me if I had asked you, wouldn't you?"

"I would have fainted. I was oblivious. I never knew you were interested. I thought I was too old."

"The Owl and the Pussycat. The Professor and the Bobby-Soxer. We missed our chance, didn't we?"

End of Chapter 3

Chapter 4: Chapter 4

Chapter 4: "Fog"

"I've been stuck here ever since," said Tracy. "The only part of the world that I can see is this bridge all the way to both ends, and the river all the way in both directions. Everything else is enshrouded in a gray fog. A void that contains absolutely nothing except all sorts of sounds that seem to be coming from nowhere."

"Do you ever go into the gray fog?" I asked.

"I spend most of my time in the gray fog. The eerie sourceless sounds are annoying, but I've never seen anything in the fog. I sleep in the fog. I sleep a lot, actually. Not much else to do. I can always see the bridge. When I'm in the fog, it appears as a sort of brightly lit doorway. I probably spend two to three hours on the bridge every day. The rest of the time I'm in the fog. As you might expect, there are few few pedestrians on the bridge to disturb me. Cars pass by all the time. I'm sure the drivers see me, but they're so focused on the road or their cell phones that they never recognize me as anything other than a pedestrian. I scare the living hell out of the pedestrians who cross the bridge. I've had a few ghosthunters show up on the bridge with all their fancy equipment. Some of the ghosthunters see me and talk to me without ever realizing what they've just encountered."

"You haven't missed anything while you've been here. Sometimes I think the opportunity to be bored would be a blessing. All I do is work, sleep, eat, and bathe. I don't even own a TV. I don't have the time and the TV news just upsets me anyway. When I have a day off, there's nowhere left to go. I used to go birdwatching, but I quit that because the woods aren't safe anymore. Drug dealers. Crooks. There's also the risk of picking up Lyme Disease or West Nile Virus. I don't have health insurance and couldn't afford to use it even if I did have it. I used to go to chess clubs, but they all seem to have died out. The rise of playing chess on the internet seems to have killed them off. The internet seems to be replacing all the old social clubs. Nowadays people just sit in front of their computers instead of going out and seeing other people. I do have an internet connection in my apartment, but I use it less and less. My computer is a white iMac from 2006. A genuine antique by today's standards. Facebook is taking all the joy out of the internet. It's killing off everything else."

"You make the fog seem downright inviting. I thought life was a miserable constant chase after money just to pay for necessities. It still strikes me as downright bizarre to throw people out into the street over money. What good is a house or apartment if it's empty?"

"You're starting to sound like me, Tracy. Life makes no sense to me either. Tell you what. I'll come see you every Sunday morning. While everybody else is at church praising God, Guns, and the Republican Party, I'll spend my Sundays with you."

"Wouldn't you rather have a girl who's alive?"

"Girls don't date men who don't have middle-class jobs. Most of them don't anyway. Would you have married another cook in the pizza parlour? Or would you have held out for a more financially secure male?"

"I married a construction worker just to get a roof over my head. Look where it landed me. I don't think I've ever really known love. If I ever got a second chance, I sure would do some things differently."

"What things would you do differently?"

"I wouldn't marry for financial security. I wouldn't starve myself to stay thin, either. Did you know that I was starving myself in high school to stay thin? Best I ever looked in a dress was after two kids. It was that third kid that made me fat. Or maybe it was my husband taking out all his stresses and frustrations on me. After 2007 he got really mean. Even meaner than he had been. I would have left him if it weren't for having kids. Having kids was a mistake. His mistake. I didn't want any. All three of my pregnancies would have been called rape if he weren't my husband. Yeah, if I got a second chance, I definitely would not have any children. I'd get my tubes tied to make sure that I didn't have any."

"So that's three things. Anything else?"

Tracy looked thoughtful. After a minute or so, she finally spoke. "Yeah, one more thing. Eat more chocolate."

I couldn't help laughing. "See you Sunday, then."

End of Chapter 4

Chapter 5: Chapter 5

Chapter 5: "Keeping a Promise"

I kept my promise to Tracy. Every Sunday morning I would walk down to the bridge and find her waiting. As you might expect, my visits were the high point of every week for her. Sometimes I even forgot that she wasn't alive. We talked about just about everything you could imagine: philosopy, religion, political science, literature, poetry, history. Tracy's intelligence amazed me. She had barely graduated from high school, but her capacity for reason and reflection exceeded that of most well-educated individuals that I knew. We discussed just about everything but current events. We both knew that the country was in a state of slow-motion collapse. We knew that there was no way to stop that collapse.

Weeks became years and years became a decade. I never missed a Sunday even when I was ill. Time catches up to us all and my years of zero medical treatment for anything finally caught up with me. I had ignored periodic dizzy spells, and finally one of those dizzy spells was fatal. I have no idea what was wrong. I hadn't had a physical exam in at least two decades. It didn't matter.

I was dead, and yet somehow I existed. I walked, if you could call it that, down to the bridge for my last meeting with Tracy. She took one brief glance at me and knew.

"So now we go together. I've been waiting all these years for someone who loved me. My exit is the river. I've always known. Look down over the side. You can see the light. It's in the water. Eternity is in the water."

We jumped.

End of Chapter 5

Chapter 6: Chapter 6

Chapter 6: "Alternate Universe"

"MY TITS ARE CAUGHT IN THE FUCKING RACK!" Tracy bellowed.

I didn't wait for the manager to leave his post at his table in the dining room. I grabbed Tracy's legs and told her to push herself upwards against the rack. A little back-and-forth maneuvering and I had her free.

I couldn't help staring as Tracy stood up in front of me. This Tracy wasn't the slim waif that I remembered working with in the pizza parlour from so long ago. She was something halfway between the slim waif and the plump matron that I had encountered on the bridge. I walked up to her and pinched her rounded cheeks. She had the same cute, heart-shaped face that she had had on the bridge. She had the hips and backside, too. All that was missing was the rounded, bulging midsection. She was quite lovely. She was, in fact, perfect.

Tracy looked at me a bit confused, and I certainly knew why.

"Do you remember everything?" she asked. I nodded yes. I remembered everything.

Tracy stared at her left hand. There was a simple wedding ring with a small stone on her ring finger. I looked at my left hand. A gold band glistened on my left hand. Realization struck both of us at the precise same moment. I embraced Tracy for a kiss right there in the kitchen. I pulled her close and pushed her long, reddish-tinted blond hair back for the kiss. I breathed in the smell of a fresh-scrubbed girl who was wearing no perfume and no makeup. I felt her soft, full, rounded breasts squish against my chest. I had my left hand behind her neck and my right hand on her soft, well-fleshed hip. Her lips had the taste of a hint of strong, unsweetened, iced tea.

"This time we'll get it right," I whispered. "Whatever we do, we'll do it together."

The End


	7. The Girl Who Talked to Trees

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sixteen-year-old girl who attempts suicide makes a startling discovery of the world around her.

The Girl Who Talked to Trees

By Nikki Little

 

After years of being tortured by my classmates at school, I celebrated my sixteenth birthday with a bottle of seconal tablets. I had had enough of the insults, taunts, exclusions, teasings, and even beatings I had suffered at the hands of my classmates. Life was suffering, and I wanted no more of it. One hundred tablets of seconal. I took every one as I didn’t want to do it again. I was lying on my bed at home alone with no one else in the house and my door locked. I sensed I was falling from celestial skies. I was far above the earth and I fell without sensing the wind. Falling, falling, ever falling with not a sound in my ear. Blessed peace. As I fell I sensed my form changing until finally I was not a person, but a seed. I fell into the ground in a park and took root. I grew a stalk, then branches, then leaves. As time passed, I grew into a tree. All around me I could hear people talking of mundane, empty things. After years, it seemed, of listening, I came to the conclusion that life was a pointless, empty competition for everything. All of life revolved around money and competing for it and all of its accompaniments. I was so happy to have escaped all of that. Life as a tree was peaceful by comparison to human life. Then I awoke. What had seemed years had actually been three minutes. I had been “dead” for a period of three minutes and had been brought back to life by a defibrillator. I remember that the first word out of my mouth upon realizing that I was alive was a four-letter obscenity. I wanted to go back to being a tree.

Of course since I was alive and sixteen years old, life meant having to go back to school. I kept to myself and talked to no one, not even teachers. I never uttered a word. I developed the habit of sitting on park benches, and sometimes, remembering my near-death hallucination, I talked to the trees around me. I never really expected a reply, but, one day, I got one of sorts. I “heard” that reply only in my head. I talked to the tree next to the bench I was sitting on and received a reply in the form of a flood of images that passed through my brain. I realized that what was different this time was that I was actually touching the tree, holding the end of a branch, as I talked to it. The stream of images that passed through my brain were the life of a middle-aged man who had lost first his job, then his home, and then his family. His wife divorced him when it became apparent that they would lose their home. She took his children, moved back with her affluent retired parents, and sued him for child support. The betrayal was too much for him. He drove his car into a tree at a curve notorious for fatal accidents. This accident, however, was not an accident. I wondered how many so-called “accidents” were actually disguised suicides. After that, I began to sit at many different park benches and talked to many trees. 

Most of the time I did not get a reply, so I assumed that not every tree was a suicide. Most of the trees really were trees. However, every so often, I found a tree that once was human. The replies I got were always in the same form: a flood of images in my mind. I had to be touching the tree to get this response. There was a mind-numbing sameness to the stories that I heard from trees. Nearly every story of a tree that was once human related to a sense of exclusion. Exclusion from family, exclusion from social circles, exclusion from social events, exclusion from economic necessities. The same image played over and over from one tree after another: the image of a door slamming in a face. Over time I had gathered from trees images of hundreds of doors slamming in hundreds of faces. As I “listened” to these outpourings of visual pain, I learned what not to do in my own life. At my school I became the girl who dated the boys that no one else would date. I was friends with the girls that everyone else shunned. I went to the junior prom with a geek. I promised myself that I would not exclude people in my life. I would not be responsible for any more human trees.

I’m middle-aged now. Many of the boys I dated in school and many of the girls I befriended are now dead. I suspect that many of those deaths, reported as “accidents,” were disguised suicides. I make my rounds at the parks every week-end, and catch up with my old friends. I hold their branches and “talk.” And they answer.

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This short story is entirely original and is entirely mine. --Nikki Little


	8. Chess Lessons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A love story, of sorts.

Chess Lessons

by Nikki Little

 

A long time ago, in a public library, sat a teenaged girl with a brand new chess set and a book. It was obvious that she was trying to learn the moves from the book, and her frustration was becoming clear. An older gentleman, perhaps a retired professor -- he had just that look, you know -- walked over to her table and offered to show her the moves. Needless to say, this happened in those happy, innocent days before every man was assumed to have evil intent when he approached a young girl. And it was, after all, a public place with lots of people around. The girl was grateful for the offer, and soon the chess pieces began to fly. At first, the rules and patterns were all just a blur for the girl, but, after just two hours, some parts of the game began to make sense. The girl asked him if he would be in the library next weekend at the same time, and he said yes. So began a long series of weekly meetings.

After a few weeks of chess lessons, the girl's play began to improve, and her squinting at the board became more obvious. The old man informed the girl that she might need glasses, and needed to say something to her parents. Sure enough, a few weeks later, in walked the girl with her brand new eyeglasses. That was back in the days before contact lenses had become common, and the girl was blissfully unselfconscious of how different, how owlish, she looked. In truth, the glasses only made the girl look as smart as she actually was. She was, at least to any adult looking on, quite lovely. The chess lessons proceeded apace, and, as the girl moved on from junior high school to high school, the old man asked her if she didn't have better things to do on a Saturday afternoon than play chess in a library with an old man. The girl didn't have any boyfriends. "Boys don't seem interested in me," she said. The girl thought the problem was her glasses, and wondered if she should stop wearing them. "Never!" said the old man. "If a boy is shallow enough to reject a beautiful, intelligent girl because she wears glasses, then he does not deserve any girl!" The girl blushed at the description of herself as "beautiful," but it was true. In a subtle, unshowy way, the girl was indeed beautiful. More beautiful than any beauty contest winner. If only the boys at the high school could see it.

The girl continued to show up at the library on Saturday afternoons, and her skill as a chess player increased. She had started playing on the school's chess team, and, to everyone's astonishment, was the best chess player in the high school. Her luck with boys, however, had not increased. She graduated from her high school without ever once being asked for a date. She missed out on her senior prom. The geeks in her chess club, however, were all quite infatuated with her, but, being geeks, they all assumed that she would reject them without a second thought. If only she had thought to ask one of the boys. After all, fair is fair. If a boy can ask a girl for a date, then shouldn't a girl be able to ask a boy for a date? This possibility, however, had never occurred to the girl.

Months passed, and the months became years. The girl graduated from college, and the old man looked a little grayer, and his eyesight became a little worse. Every Saturday afternoon they still met for chess at the library. "Have you a boyfriend, my dear?" asked the old man. No, she still had no boyfriend. She had never even had a date. "Put away your chess set, my dear," said the old man. "Indulge an old man with an afternoon of your time."

They went to one of those small general goods stores that today no longer exist, and he bought a kite. They went to the park, and the breezes of an unusually cool summer day lifted the kite right up. The old man gave the kite to girl once it was up and sat down to watch. After she was through with the kite, she gave it away to a child in threadbare clothes who had watched with envy. She was worried that the old man would be offended that she had given away his kite, but he was delighted. Afterwards, they went to a small family-owned pizza shop which used an old-fashioned wood-fired oven. It was the best pizza she had ever eaten. The old man paid, and the girl objected when he refused her share of the check. "My dear," he said, "now you need never say again that you have never had a date!" He chuckled, and she realized that he was right. "Now there's someone I'd like you to meet," the old man said. "I have a nephew who is a nice fellow, but he's bashful around women, and hasn't the nerve to ask anyone. Be kind, I ask you, for he is quite inept around women. Tongue-tied, I think you would say." The girl kissed his cheek, and the old man laughed. "But I'm much too old for you, my dear!" She went on the date with the old man's nephew, but things didn't work out. She was back at the library the next Saturday afternoon, and told the old man that she was sorry that his attempt at match-making had failed. She did learn one thing from the date with the old man's nephew, however. It wasn't her glasses that had been putting the boys and men off. It was her intelligence. The poor girl, smart as she was, had never learned the art of "playing dumb." She hadn't realized how intimidating her intellectual prattle seemed.

Months became years, and years became decades. At their weekly meetings at the library for chess, the old man could now barely see, and the young woman was now middle-aged with a few faint lines on her face. The slim figure of her youth had thickened slightly, and her hips stretched the fabric of her dress. She had let her hair grow long, and blond curls draped in front of the chess board. Each was oblivious to the changes in the other. The girl only saw the handsome, old fellow in the tweed jacket which he had worn when she first met him. The old man saw only the slim, teen-aged girl with the blond curls framing her innocently beautiful face. All things pass, and one day the old man failed to show up for their Saturday afternoon chess games. A library clerk walked up to the woman, and showed her the old man's obituary in the newspaper. It dawned on her that after all these years that she did not know his last name. She attended his funeral, and continued to show up at the library on Saturday afternoons. After all, for an intellectual, there was no greater place to spend free time than a library. 

One Saturday afternoon, she brought her chess set to the library -- something she hadn't done since her aged companion had died. She disappeared into an obscure corner of the library where a single table for two and two chairs stood. High overhead was an open window where breezes came in from a courtyard. Sunlight always shone down on the high bookstacks behind the table. The sunlight, however, did not hit the table itself, and there was no glare. The girl sat down and set up her chess set. Every Saturday afternoon after that, if you stand by a nearby stack and keep out of sight, you can hear whispers and giggles. If you listen really hard, every minute or so, you can hear the sound of a chess piece being moved.

The End


	9. The Devil and the Priest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A priest tempts the Devil.

The Devil and the Priest

by Nikki Little

After his sermon every Sunday, a priest fell into the habit of playing chess with a parishioner who was unusually well-dressed. They were both quite good at the game, and marveled that in this day and age of computers, it was still even possible to find a human opponent who was willing to play face-to-face instead of anonymously via internet chess servers. For a long time, they were accustomed to play with other church people hovering nearby, but one day, they found themselves alone for the first time.

"You're not really who you appear to be, are you?" asked the priest.

"What on earth would make you ask a question like that?" asked the parishioner.

"I see you in the newspapers in the financial section all the time making deals that would make Donald Trump blush," said the priest. "You're not really a businessman, now, are you?"

"And just who would you say that I am?" asked the parishioner.

"You're my old nemesis. The nemesis of every religious and philosophical person on earth. Even atheists might debate your existence, as if the source of your power were the inner, uncivilized beast in all of us that makes us worship at the alter of wealth. Evil is not created by you, it is merely exploited by you."

"How could you possibly see all that in little old me?"

"Because you are temptation personified. You buy people's souls when you hire them for your various international businesses. What better place to hunt for souls than a church where people go to assure themselves that the world we live in is a Godly place?. Most of my parishioners do not worship God. They worship idols, the worst of which is the one in the collection plate."

"You are quite perceptive, for a priest. Most go about their duties with a weary, self-imposed blindness. They are horrified at how ineffectual they are. If priests were really effective at spreading the message of Christianity, there would be no men like me in the pews."

"And that means..." queried the priest.

"And that means that there would be no rich people. There would be no laying up of wealth in this realm. There would be no haves and have-nots. There would be no beggars in the streets of the world's cities. The Peaceable Kingdom where the lion and the lamb lie down together would be a reality."

"Why have you not tempted me?"

"I have no need of tempting you. I win souls in employment interviews. People do not realize that they are selling their souls when they sign employment contracts with me. In return for enormous salaries, I win their souls not because they just signed them away, but because they agree to do my bidding in the name of business interests. They turn a blind eye to all the harm they do in the name of the bottom line. It's just business. For me, too, it's just business." The parishioner chuckled at his cleverness.

"You mentioned that it is very hard to find a face-to-face opponent for chess in this day and age of computers. Are you aware of the concept of shareware?"

"Try before you buy computer programs? The most generous of them these days offer 30 days of full functionality before they stop working."

"Make me a trial offer," said the priest.

"Surely you jest," said the parishioner. "What have I got that could possibly interest you? I know already that you are incorruptible."

"I am also in despair at ever accomplishing anything. My parishioners do not hear the message of my sermons. They listen politely to the sounds that my vocal cords make, and a polite few even nod their heads in agreement, but they do not hear the message."

"A priest who is having an existential crisis," chuckled the parishioner. "I have encountered your type before. And what would you have me do for you?"

"Give me a trial. Give me a fifteen-day try before you buy," said the priest.

"Oh, my," said the parishioner. "What have I got to lose, eh? And just what is it that you would ask in exchange for your immortal soul?"

"Strip away all of people's illusions. Make the illusions vanish into the dust from which they came," said the priest.

"Oh, my," said the parishioner. "You don't want much. Even I am not sure what would happen if all of people's illusions were vanquished. You have whetted my curiosity. Your fifteen-day trial without obligation or contract will be granted. I, too, am curious to see what would happen. I have my suspicions, but I am not certain. It will be a grand test for you and me both. Starting immediately, it is done."

And so it was done. The first of people's illusions that vanished into air was the idea that government-issued currency had value. The little slips of paper and the coins of common metals all disappeared into thin air. Governments around the world scrambled for a new means to exert an authority that was now revealed to be based more on brute force than anything else. Even in the model democracies of Scandinavia, the new taxes were imposed on the productive so that governments could continue functioning.

What were those new taxes? Taxes on agricultural production. The new world currency became paper backed by bushels of wheat, corn, rice, and so on. Now people grasped the reality of what was really being spent when governments proposed budgets of massive spending on projects of questionable value. Which in turn led to the dropping of the next illusion.

The idea that wars solve problems. In reality, wars solve problems only when everyone on one side has been killed or surrendered. Even in a war like World War Two in which the obvious evil was vanquished, the problems continued to simmer under the surface. Nationalism, racism, lust for conquest, all the reasons why wars occurred were still there. New wars erupted after World War Two. There was no such thing as a war to end all wars. When people realized that they were dumping food into the great blender of war machines, their desire to slaughter each other waned. They decided that they would rather eat than trade food for weapons. The arms dealers went bankrupt almost overnight.

The next illusion that collapsed was the idea that land belongs to the titleholder. All the titles in the world vanished. Old-fashioned paper from business vaults. Digital records from computers. No one knew who held the mortgages. The monthly mortgage bills vanished from homeowners' mailboxes. The homeless moved into empty foreclosed homes because, after all, they were just sitting there unused. The idea that property belongs to the purchaser evaporated into dust. Property belonged to the user.

The next illusion that vanished was that the consumer society represented the height of civilization and shared happiness. The shopping malls vanished into thin air, and landless squatters moved in immediately to plant crops and set up makeshift shelters. The dispossessed of the world reclaimed what had once been occupied by the cathedrals of the affluent.

By this time, the parishioner was getting nervous and was thinking that perhaps he had given way too much, but the illusions kept dropping. The next illusion to vanish was the idea that one could own knowledge. Proprietary operating systems vanished from computers around the world. Old, obscure, and obsolete operating systems such as OS/2, Irix, and variations of Unix returned. A thousand versions of Linux bloomed on modern computers and government workstations. Debian Linux with KDE replaced Windows and Debian with Gnome replaced Mac OS X. Microsoft and Apple went belly-up like pond fish in a heat wave. Bookstores became neighborhood libraries. Children in the third world delighted in playing video games that had once cost a month's wages of their countries' near-worthless currencies. Every book on the planet became available for download. Writers, artists, musicians, and others who produced for the public became public servants instead of purveyors of intellectual property. Directors and actors made movies without thought or worry of payment. They received public servant salaries, and that was enough.

The next illusion to fall was the idea that everything had to have a price. By this time, the fifteen-day trial was nearly up, and the parishioner's nerves were completely shot. When prices vanished, the makeshift paper currencies based on food commodities vanished. Barter was too much trouble and people just shared what they had in the way of the old hunter-gatherer societies that had existed before the development of agriculture.

There was one final illusion to fall, and meanwhile the parishioner was having a nervous breakdown. With the extinction of currencies, it became practically impossible for governments to levy taxes, and without taxes, the very reason for the existence of central governments disappeared. The world became a place of localities. Power devolved to local councils where all had a say, and not just a privileged few. People shared what they had, and no one stuck out a hand for payment. With desperation and poverty disappearing, crime became something committed by the mentally ill - who were treated with compassion in medical centers instead of being locked up. The world's jails emptied. The parishioner showed up for his second Sunday meeting with the priest after the day of the bargain unfit for the playing of chess.

"That was quite a trick you pulled on me. It is people's illusions which makes it possible for me to steal their souls. Take away their illusions and I have nothing to tempt them with. You shall have your fifteen-day trial, but there will be no bargain. Yours would be the last soul I ever gathered if I agreed to your request. You already knew that, didn't you?"

"Yes," said the priest. "I already knew that. I knew that you would never agree to the bargain. I got fifteen days for free just like most users of shareware who have no intention of ever paying. I guess you could say I cheated you."

"You are an excellent businessman. You missed your calling."

"Thank you," said the priest. "Perhaps you will come back tomorrow when the world is back to normal for our games of chess? And then it is I who will tempt you."

The End

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Version 2


	10. The Lost Vision of Walter Will

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An affluent newspaper pundit purchases an antique mirror and takes a trip through Alice's Looking Glass -- or so he thinks.

The Lost Vision of Walter Will

by Nikki Little

It was another day in the life of newspaper columnist Walter Will. Today he had written another psalm of praises to the capitalist system in the United States and praised it for having completely wiped out the worst excesses of poverty there. He claimed there was no better country on Earth in which to be poor. He had done well today. Around seven o'clock in the evening, he began to drift off to sleep. A new acquisition in his living room, a full-length antique mirror with baroque framing, held his attention. As he drifted off to sleep, he thought he saw a young, freckle-faced, red-haired girl in the mirror. Alas, there was no staying awake.

A sound disturbed his slumber and Walter Will, proud promoter of free-market capitalism, opened his eyes. The girl in the mirror had returned. She appeared to be about fifteen, but it was difficult to tell. "Come, Walter," she seemed to say. "Come take a walk with me."

Walter Will arose from his chair and walked toward the girl. She wasn't in the room, only in the mirror. Yet Walter Will could hear her. "This isn't real," thought Walter Will. "I'm dreaming." The girl in the mirror beckoned. And Walter Will stepped through.

"Take a look around you," said the girl. "What do you see?" Walter Will looked around the forlorn neighborhood of abandoned homes with peeling paint and decaying wood. Notices appeared on the front doors of many of the homes. It was obvious that the homes with notices on the front doors were unoccupied. The girl beckoned to a reflection in a puddle of water. "Another place to visit, Walter." Walter Will stepped into the puddle with the girl and was enveloped in a curtain of shimmering silver.

 

"Now look around this place," said the girl. Walter Will looked around him. Palm trees lined the streets. Soft, warm breezes floated through the air. Walter Will recognized this place. It was Honolulu. Then he noticed all the people sitting up against the sides of buildings, meager bags of belongings beside them. They were everywhere, and they were glaring at him. "Are you frightened, Walter? Would you like to leave?" Yes, Walter Will wanted to leave. The girl beckoned to a reflection in a Vietnamese grocery store window. Once again, Walter Will was enveloped in a curtain of shimmering silver.

"What do you see this time, Walter?" The wreckage of the floodwaters that had inundated New Orleans was clearly visible. Whole neighborhoods looked abandoned. Many people were living in homes still caked in mud and obviously unfit for human habitation. "Where is this wonderful country in which to be poor that you speak of, Walter? Do you see it anywhere here?" The girl beckoned toward a creek in which she was reflected. Once again, Walter Will was transported to a new place in a curtain of shimmering silver.

This time they were sitting in the back of a classroom in which every student was a black teenager. There was no air conditioning and every window, uselessly, was open. Not one student had a textbook. They all sat fanning themselves in hopes of relieving themselves from the heat. The teacher, a young white woman of good intentions, stood at the front before a worn-out painted-on green chalkboard utterly defeated in her demeanor. Sweat poured down her face. A student worker appeared at the door and picked up the attendance list. At that moment, about one-third of the students got up and walked out the door. The teacher made no effort to stop them. "How long do you think this young woman will last as a teacher here, Walter Will? Can you not see that she has already given up? She was a Peace Corps teacher in West Africa for two years. She is no stranger to hardship. Why do you think the students here show so little interest in education? They are not stupid." The girl led Walter Will out into the hallway where they paused in front of the glass pane in the doorway to another classroom. Once again they vanished into the reflection.

"Do you recognize this place, Walter Will?" Walter Will did not. It was an Open Door homeless shelter in Houston, Texas. There was hardly room to stand the place was so crowded. "Where do you think all these homeless people come from, Walter Will? Do you really believe that they are here solely because they made what you call bad decisions? Is it possible that some of them are here through no fault of their own?" Walter Will gave his usual response: "If people would just make the effort and work hard, they would do well. These people are here because they didn't do what is necessary to succeed in our society of opportunity for all." The girl looked exasperated. "Do you really believe that, Walter Will?" she asked. A woman with two small children sat a bench. Her tears pooled on the concrete. "There's a reflection in that pool of tears, Walter Will. Let us step through again." The curtain of shimmering silver reappeared.

"You are now in a place that few people see, Walter Will. Come. Let us have a meal with some friends of mine." Walter Will followed the girl to an outdoor dining table. It was covered with fresh white linen. Multiple tea sets covered the table. Plates of tea cakes, cheese, fresh exotic fruits, dark-grain breads, and small bars of chocolate filled the table. The aroma of spiced orange-peel tea filled the air. Walter Will pulled out his wallet and asked how much for the buffet. "Oh, Walter! Do you not understand? You are a guest, here! There is no need to pay. Indeed, it is impossible to pay for anything here. There is no such thing as money here." Now Walter Will was confused. "Just where are we?" Walter Will asked. "This place has many names, Walter Will. Utopia, Shangri-La, Wonderland, Heaven. It is a place where there is only one rule: Be kind. Why must there be a price on everything?" Walter Will did not recognize that this was a moment to keep silent. "Don't you see?" he said. "Prices that float freely up and down are necessary to create the most efficient allocation of resources! Everyone with an ounce of economics education knows that!" The girl was not the least bit disturbed. Quietly she asked, "Just who, Walter Will, is all that efficiency for?" Walter Will made his final mistake. He answered. "That efficiency exists to create the maximum benefit for consumers." The girl continued, "And just who are these consumers, Walter Will?" Walter Will proceeded to dig his own grave: "People with money, of course!"

This time the girl did not seek out a reflection. She reached into a pocket on her dress. The universe went white. There was absolutely nothing but Walter Will and his guide in a sea of endless white. Walter Will's guide now appeared as a young woman clothed in flowing robes of shimmering white. At her side was a sheath holding something with an ornate handle. "You are not dreaming. I'm an angel. And I am angry. Because you are unwilling to see in your world, so shall ye be unable to see in your world." The angel unsheathed a long, heavy, gleaming sword and threw it straight at Walter Will's head. Walter Will stood hypnotized as the sword twirled slowly through the air toward his head. Time seemed to stand still. Then the universe exploded in a flash of blinding colors. Walter Will woke up, but all was not right in the world. Walter Will awoke in blackness. Walter Will was completely, irreversibly, blind.

The End

This story is mostly original, although the influence of Lewis Carroll should be obvious to all. -- Nikki Little


	11. Abolition Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While visiting the Lincoln Memorial, a stockbroker catches a glimpse of the world that might have been.

Abolition Day

by Nikki Little

 

The nurse looked at me with surprise in her eyes. I suppose it’s not every day that a grown man sits in a hospital bed and cries after nothing more than a knot on the head. It wasn’t the knot on the head that was the reason for my tears. I held in my hand a printed travel brochure which confirmed my belief that what I had seen and experienced in the past three hours was real. I had had a glimpse of paradise, and I lost it.

I have been a stock broker all my life. I seem to have the gift of gab and the ability to talk people into just about anything -- even things that are against their own best interests. I guess you could say that I am a natural-born salesman. I have enjoyed a considerable measure of financial success and live a very comfortable life in a city known for high living expenses. I’ve always known about the less fortunate of Washington D.C., but I rarely see them because all of my life takes place in the areas that are prosperous, safe, and expensive. The only negative in my pampered existence, I suppose, is the lack of free time which I have to do anything of my own choosing. I am a bachelor. I live alone. I spend almost all of my time working. I sit at that rarified border between the upper-middle class and the rich. I suppose I could claim that I earned all my wealth as I inherited none of it. It was all from commissions that I had earned. A funny word “earned” is: what people claim as “earned” is actually what is proffered by the workings of a highly selective “free market” which seems to withold its blessings to a very select few. I am one of those select few. I think I am lucky. I “earned” everything that I have, but to claim that I deserve all that I have is quite another matter.

I had finally gotten a rare Saturday off from work, and I chose to spend it seeing some of the sights of Washington D.C. that had somehow eluded me all my life even though I lived in the area. How I reached middle age without seeing the Lincoln Memorial which was within 15 miles of my apartment, I do not know. It was time. 

I stood before the memorial and contemplated what kind of a country the United States would be today if it had not been for “The Great Emancipator.” Deep down in my heart, I thought that the United States of today would not be all that much different. The slaves had been freed from a slavery of a pure type only to be thrown to wolves of a different type: the Northern industrialists who lusted after cheap, black labor. With so many former slaves suddenly being thrown into the labor market, it is inconceivable that Northern factory owners did not react to the increased supply of labor by cutting wages for all of their employees. No doubt the white working class who had fought the war would feel used. I wonder how many focused their anger not on the industrialists, but on the perceived “new enemy” of black laborers who were paid less for the same work -- and thus a threat to livelihoods. The thought entered my mind that perhaps the emancipation that Lincoln had in mind was never carried out because of his assassination. What if the freeing of the slaves was only half of what Lincoln had in mind? The history of the past is written in stone, and I felt that my question was a mystery that could never be answered. What if? What if?

When I walked away from the Lincoln Memorial and headed for the nearest subway station, I caught a glimpse of three shadowy men who grabbed me and dragged me into an alley. They did not look like common criminals -- their dress was too formal for that. I woke up in the hospital -- the same hospital in which I now reside. The nurse told me that I had had a nasty fall and had hit my head against a stone wall. I checked my wallet, and discovered that nothing was missing. Whoever the three men had been, they were not thieves.

I was released from the hospital without any further ado, and the first mystery I encountered was the lack of paperwork as I exited the hospital. No papers to sign. No insurance forms to deal with. No hassles at all. The hospital did not seem especially concerned with payment for its services. This was certainly something that I had never experienced before. I was convinced that health care in the U.S. had become purely a commodity like everything else, and that hospitals would sooner let someone die than risk nonpayment for services.

As I walked out onto the streets, I noticed that the plethora of high-end retailers to which I was so accustomed seemed to have vanished into thin air. Small, functional shops had replaced them. There were no prices mentioned in the windows. I entered a small Latin-American grocery store where everything was labeled in Spanish. There were about a dozen other people in the store filling small hand baskets with items. They walked up to the checkout where, mysteriously, there was no cash register. There were only bags for the goods. The store owner, or storekeeper, hustled among the aisles restocking, and seemed oblivious to the customers that left his store after bagging their items and not paying. I walked up to him and asked him if he was aware that he was being robbed, but he answered me in Spanish. I did not speak Spanish and he did not speak English. I pointed to the customers walking out without paying, and he nodded his head up and down and smiled. Instead of getting upset, he offered me a fresh mango from his cart. He put it in my pocket and shooed me out the door. He was still smiling and waved as I walked away confused.

Out on the street, I noticed that there were only two police officers in sight within all directions. That was certainly many fewer police officers than I was used to seeing. I entered a subway station and noticed that there were more affluent-appearing people than I was used to seeing in the subways. The transit police whom I was accustomed to seeing everywhere were nowhere in sight. There were no turnstiles. I looked around wondering if I had entered via the wrong area, but nothing seemed amiss. There were no turnstiles. People boarded the subway trains without paying. I looked around for the ticket vending machines, but did not see any. I thought of the machines which had once dispensed bus tokens and had vanished during my childhood. Perhaps some new way of paying for subway trips had been implemented, some means of which I was unaware. I boarded the subway train traveling to the Lincoln Memorial. I had just seen it, but for some reason unknown to me, I felt the need to see it again. Or perhaps I just needed to see that place where I had been “mugged.”

The subway stopped near the Lincoln Memorial, and I exited noticing that there appeared to be no turnstiles on the opposite side of the tracks. I walked up the stairs and found the same Lincoln Memorial as before, and yet somehow, it wasn’t the same. There wasn’t the same heavy police presence as before, and the area was filled with vendors who, bizarrely, did not take payment for anything they offered. Hot dog vendors, candy vendors, soft drink peddlers, taco stands, gryo stands, and all other sorts of park vendors were there. No money was visible exchanging hands anywhere. I also noticed for the first time that everywhere I looked, doors had no locks on them. No locks! How was that possible?

I walked up to the Lincoln Memorial just as I had before, and stood there, this time contemplating all that I had witnessed in the last few hours. I thought about the changes that “The Great Emancipator” had brought to our country, and what would have been had he not been assassinated. A young woman tour guide walked up to me and shoved a brochure in my hand. “He was our only four-term president, you know,” she said to me, lovely gray eyes reflecting the sun. I glanced at the base of the memorial stone noticing a date. Lincoln had lived to 1879? What? The young woman who had given me the brochure had disappeared.

I walked past the same place where I had been “mugged” and once again encountered the same three men. “Not again!” I thought as they dragged me into the alley. I woke up in the hospital. Again. The exact same hospital. The exact same room. The exact same nurse. I asked her to get my suit from my closet. I hesitated a moment, and then reached into the pockets. I was truly not sure of what I would find in them, if anything at all. Out of one pocket I pulled a mango, which I gave to the nurse. She stared at me in surprise, as most people do not carry fruit in their pockets. Out of the other pocket I pulled the brochure which the gray-eyed young woman had given to me. I read the brochure and found the answer to what troubled me. I had seen Paradise, and I had lost it. I handed the brochure to the nurse, and told her to read it.

“It’s just the Gettysburg Address,” she said.

“Read it again,” I said. “Read all of it. Down to the last line.”

The Gettysburg Address

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate...we cannot consecrate...we cannot hallow...this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us...that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Therefore, from this day forward, as enacted by the People’s Congress, not only is slavery henceforth abolished in all territories controlled by this government or Union armies, but the very institution which gave birth to this atrocity, capitalism, is also abolished. From this day forward, the private ownership of land is abolished. The farmer shall till his land unencumbered by rents or shares owed to some distant investor. The private ownership of factories, mines, and oil wells is abolished. The government shall run these facilities for the benefit of all. A program for a transition to an economy without money or prices has been drawn up by the People’s Congress and passed. On this day I signed it. Even barter shall eventually be swept away. From this day forward, want, penury, and misery are abolished. No longer shall the many suffer for the benefit of the few. There will be no compensation for the disinherited investors. They are abolished. They are swept away. They shall trouble you no more. They shall live like the rest of us, or they shall flee. From this day forward shall rise a new ethic of sharing, for the world belongs to each and every one of us. God bless you all. Thank you.

\--Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863, now known as Abolition Day


	12. Darwin's Feast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A politician who preaches rugged self-reliance to poor people gets a taste of the dog-eat-dog society that he advocates.

“Darwin's Feast”

by Nikki Little

 

Our local congressional representative was at it again in the editorial pages of the local newspaper. I had picked the newspaper off a vacated table at a McDonald's under the watchful eye of a police officer. With a homeless encampment located only a five-minute walk away, the McDonald's management had hired an off-duty police officer to be at the restaurant all hours that it was open to the public. The face of the police officer changed every two to three hours, but his task remained the same: prevent begging. We homeless were allowed to use the restrooms – no small matter – but that was the only concession that the management made to us. Access to bathing facilities was listed as a requirement for employment.

The editorial lectured the unemployed to stop being a drain on productive members of society. He called us “takers,” “moochers,” “leeches,” and a few other insulting terms. “Do not expect Mommy Government to pay your bills for you. You must take personal responsibility for your own situation. If you do not succeed in our society, you have no one to blame but yourself.” Very profound for a guy born to a trust fund, I thought. I'd heard this social darwinist bullshit before. In fact, I think I had been hearing it since the 1980s. Reagan, damn his soul, had made it respectable again. This congress critter really rubbed me the wrong way. I wondered if he had the guts to bring his “message” to a homeless encampment. There wasn't a one of us in the homeless encampment that hadn't applied to this McDonald's for a job. Most of us had either college degrees or trade skills. We weren't supposed to be unemployed according to the current ideology of only “bad choices” being responsible for unemployment. Yet we were unemployed. Most of the employees in the McDonald's were fresh college graduates with heavy student loan debt. They were desperate to keep the bill collectors off their backs. They worked at McDonald's, lived with their parents, and put marriage on a shelf that I think they knew would be forever out of reach. How did this fucker get elected? I sure knew that it wasn't the college grads voting for people like him.

I wrote a reply on a piece of paper and walked it over to the post office. It was a hot, humid summer day, and the walk was tiring. The postal clerk behind the counter winced when I counted out a bunch of pennies for an envelope and stamp and came up seven cents short. The clerk took his own change purse out of his pocket and added seven cents to my pile and then swept it into his palm to dump it into the cash register. The tea partier behind me kicked up a fuss over the clerk giving me seven cents, but the clerk stated with annoyance, “Mind your own business,” and pointed to the police officer on duty at the other end of the spacious lobby. This was the downtown post office, and it was quite large. It had century-old murals up on the walls depicting the labor history of the United States. The murals were famous which was probably the only thing which kept the local politicians from having them painted over. The clerk took my letter and wished me a nice day. His voice had an unexpected warmth to it as he recited what is usually a mechanically spoken phrase.

To my surprise, my letter had some effect. Our local congress critter would indeed address the homeless with his message of personal responsibility. At the McDonald's. That, it seemed, was as close as he wanted to get to an actual homeless encampment. Needless to say, there would be a few extra police officers on duty in the McDonald's.

He did show up at the McDonald's, but it was a nearly all-white crowd of enthusiastic tea partiers who had turned out to hear him speak as evening turned to twilight. I saw no other homeless in the crowd. I was the only one. There were four police officers in the McDonald's instead of the more usual one. This McDonald's, the downtown unit, was very large and had plenty of space for the crowd. All four of the police officers looked bored as “Mr. Personal Responsibility” threw a steady supply of red meat to the crowd of tea partiers. Maybe it was the warmth of his reception that lulled his sense of danger. I left the crowd inside and went out into the dimly lit parking lot to an outdoor dining table near some small, bushy trees. I knew that I was out of view of the security cameras.

I was still there when the tea partiers started to stream out the doors. Apparently the event was over. The three police officers who had been sent by the police department to provide security came out and drove away. I could see that our congress critter was still inside. He had made what turned out to be a fatal mistake. He hung around for a meal, apparently to prove his common man credentials, and engaged in some chit-chat with the off-duty police officer working security for McDonald's. I'll bet that the congress critter's desire to strip public employees of their union bargaining rights really went down well with the police officer. I'm sure it was on his mind. The congress critter's car was parked right next to the outdoor covered dining tables right where I was sitting, conveniently out of view of the security cameras. I sensed an opportunity.

The congress critter came out to his car, and, keeping the bushy trees between me and the security camera mounted on top of a lamp pole, I pressed a hunting knife to his side and marched him straight down to a cluster of evergreen trees next to our encampment near the riverbank. There were about fifteen of us total down there. We were invisible. There had been a homeless encampment in this location since the first Reagan term. None of us could remember the last time a newspaper reporter showed up. Or a police officer. The local government office employees in the big city and county government building across the street from the McDonald's had gotten used to seeing street people in the restaurant. They didn't notice us anymore. We were part of the local décor. There were two families with teen-aged children and a bunch of single males. There were two single, middle-aged women in our group, but you'd never know that they were women unless you looked very closely. They were both painfully thin with curveless bodies and weathered faces. They wore men's clothes and were just as grimy as the rest of us. One had a photograph of herself from twenty years ago. She had been plump, buxom, and baby-faced. She had looked like a plus-size model. Now she had the lean, muscled look of a construction worker. All of us had long hair. I knew all of my campmates well. I knew they'd go along with what I had in mind.

I tied up our congress critter with metal chains to a series of wooden planks nailed together inside the stand of evergreen trees near the riverbank. I didn't bother to gag him. The sound of the rapidly flowing river water would have drowned him out anyway. The evergreen grove had a way of absorbing sound, too. We normally used the wooden planks for cleaning the occasional fish we caught or gutting the occasional rabbit or squirrel we trapped. The wooden planks were about to get a new use. The two single women started a fire, and the congress critter, of course, was very interested in what we were intending.

“Well,” I said, “you're always preaching self-reliance and making do with what you have, and that's what we're doing.” I wondered if our congress critter knew how to do anything besides make money with the huge stack his father had spotted him as a trust fund. Probably not.

One of the two women who had started the fire came over with some instructions for me. “Make sure that you leave enough of the arm so that we can apply a tourniquet. We have to keep him alive so that the meat won't spoil.” It was July. Stuff can go bad real quick in the summer outdoors.

I turned to the congress critter whose eyes were now wide open and staring. “I do apologize for the fact that we can't kill you first, but we don't have any refrigeration and we're hoping for four meals.” His mouth was open, but no sound came forth as I brought the axe down on his upper right arm.

The End

 

This story is completely original and belongs to me alone. --Nikki Little


	13. The Portrait in Burnt Sienna

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A schoolteacher discovers an unsettling, single-color portrait of a man falling through the air hidden behind the backplate of a workbench in a rented home. It appears to portray a location located nearby. Curiosity gets the best of her.

The Portrait in Burnt Sienna

By Nikki Little

 

One of the problems with moving to a new place is that you are completely unfamiliar with your surroundings. I had just moved to a new small town to teach English at the public high school. I needed a place to live, and, by sheer luck, it seemed, a small house on the corner of the street right next to the high school was vacant. A small dusty sign in the window down in the corner read simply “For Rent” and had a phone number. I didn’t know then that the house had been vacant for nearly a decade. I didn’t know the reason why the house had been vacant so long, either. It was located on one side of an overgrown access lane to a farm that appeared abandoned.

The owner seemed most anxious to rent the house and did not put up any fuss when I made a deliberately absurd low offer. I cited the obvious lack of upkeep and general dustiness of the place when I made my offer. I felt an unease when the owner immediately accepted my offer. However, I needed a place to stay, and I had only a few days before the school year started, so I moved in immediately, dust and all. I required in the rental contract that the owner would complete all necessary repairs to essential equipment in the house in two weeks, but, to my surprise, everything functioned.

I did some quick dusting in the upstairs area to make the house livable, and then concentrated all my efforts on preparing for the new school year. Once a school year has started, school teachers’ lives are not their own. On the first weekend after school had started, I ventured back into the unfinished and cobweb-enshrouded basement to do some cleaning and make the laundry area usable. The washer and dryer looked ancient, but I already knew that both of them worked as I had started them when I did my initial inspection of the house. The owner had kept the electricity connected all those years that the house was unoccupied. The neighbors told me that on the rare occasions that he was in the house, he had every light in the house on. They said that he was afraid to stay in the house for longer than a few minutes -- and never after dark. They thought that he was looking for something. Every two or three weeks after the school year started, the owner of the house would stop by and ask me if I had found any unusual drawings in the house. I had not.

I slowly and methodically cleaned out the cobwebs in the basement, and then went back and began dusting surfaces. I thought no more of it at that point. Each weekend, thereafter, I performed a quick dusting to prevent the cobwebs from returning and pretty much ignored the build-up of dust on everything else. Teachers don't really have time to dust during the school year. The job consumes us. After a month or so, I realized that the only cobweb I was finding each weekend was always in the same place. At first I was merely irritated, then I started feeling a little spooked. During Thanksgiving Vacation, I went downstairs to give the basement a thorough dusting -- it really needed it by then. At the place of the persistently reappearing cobweb, at the left side of an old gun-rack next to a battered workbench with a vise, I finally spotted what had escaped my notice all those earlier times that I had picked down the cobweb. Behind the workbench backplate was a plastic bag covering what appeared to be a picture frame. It could only be seen while standing very close to the wall just to the left of the gun-rack. I pulled out the plastic bag and removed its contents. It was indeed a painting, of sorts. It was a most unusual painting, and it sent a chill down my spine as I inspected it. It reminded me of a charcoal drawing, except it was entirely in a dark brown, plaster-like paint instead of gray sketching. The color reminded me of a crayon from childhood: "Burnt Sienna."

It is difficult to give an accurate portrayal of the painting from a description. The painting, in spite of its lack of colors, was vivid, intense, and even a bit frightening. It showed a terrified man falling through the air toward a space located right next to a vacant farm house. There was an abandoned farm right next to the school that looked suspiciously like what I saw in the painting. I had stacks of finished compositions that needed to be graded -- I had students submit a first draft and second draft of every composition for my comments before I had them turn in a finished paper -- and gave the painting no further thought other than to hang it in my study which was where my big, antique teacher's desk with all its pigeonholes and slots was located. My placement of the painting in that room turned out to be fortuitous. A cobweb began appearing attached to precisely the same spot on the painting. Every time I pulled the cobweb down, it reappeared within a few days. When the owner appeared, as was his habit, to ask if I had found any unusual drawings in the house, I gave him my usual answer. I did not mention the painting.

After pulling down the cobweb from the painting for what was surely the tenth time, I began to think about the fact that the farm in the painting reminded me of the abandoned farm right next to me. I decided that I would do some investigating during Christmas Vacation. In the middle of a Saturday night, the first Saturday after school had let out for two weeks of Christmas Vacation, I went up to the farm to look for the space which corresponded to the location on the painting. With the help of faint moonlight, I easily found the place: it was a heap of rocks that looked out of place in the old, grown-up, abandoned cornfield. Everywhere else was foxtail grass with stray stalks of corn. Wooden poles lay beside the pile of rocks, and I picked one up and pushed some of the rocks aside. Underneath the pile of rocks were some wooden planks lying across an opening that turned out to be an abandoned well. I was a bit worried about the stability of the ground surrounding the well, but if it was going to collapse inwardly, it would have already done so. Moonlight illuminated one side of the well to expose old brickwork. I wondered how old the bricks were. Cold started to soak through my coat and blue jeans, and I decided to go home. I wondered how my students would have reacted if they had seen me wearing blue jeans. I wore only dresses to school. 

The next morning, I went into my study to look out the bedroom window to see if the newspaper was in the driveway, and the cobweb on the painting was back. I had just pulled it off the previous day, and it was back again. I began to wonder if the cobweb was "nagging" me to do something. The reappearing cobweb that had tormented me in the basement had not shown up since I had removed the painting from its plastic-enshrouded hiding place behind the workbench backplate. "You win," I said to the cobweb as I pulled it down. I went back to the abandoned well that night with a flashlight and a small pocket telescope.

What was I looking for? I think by this point it should be obvious. That night I switched into blue jeans and put on a heavy winter jacket for my foray to the well. My flashlight was a heavy, steel, 4-cell type that was used by fire departments. I had no respect for cheap flashlights and refused to have them in the house as they never worked when you needed them. My telescope was one of those small, hand-held 30X types. I had quite a time trying to hold the telescope steady while at the same time aiming the heavy, steel flashlight directly at the bottom of the well. I didn't get to see a lot, but I saw enough to know that the bottom of the well was dry and that there was mostly rock, gravel, and rotted tree branches at the bottom. I also saw what I was looking for poking up through the gravel. Something dirty, off-white. A bone? I was looking for a body. That dirty, off-white object was enough to make me want to see more. But how? I decided to return home to give the matter some thought.

After getting dressed for bed, I went into my study to look at the painting wondering if the cobweb would be back. It was not. In fact, from that point on, I never saw the cobweb again. Later that same day, I got the idea of using the time-delay on an old camera to take photos of the bottom of the well. The maximum delay was 60 seconds, and I wondered if that would be enough time to get the camera to the bottom. I got the idea of using a fishing rod to lower the camera, and attached a weight to the line to make the camera less likely to swing wildly and smash into the brick sides of the well.

That night at around two o'clock in the morning, I put my plan into action. I decided to shoot a dozen pictures to use up an entire roll of film. I lost the first two photos from not being able to lower the camera quickly enough, but after that I was successful. By the time I got to the last three shots, I was quite ready to grab my stuff and leave. I was most impatient to see the film developed, and took it to an independent camera shop to have it developed.

When I received the film back, the owner of the camera shop eyed me curiously as he handed the developed photos in an envelope to me, but he said nothing. I examined the photos in the car, and it was clear that I had exactly what I was wanting. 

I went home, grabbed the painting, stuffed several of the photos into an envelope, and headed for the police department. The police officer listened to my story, smiled as if he were wasting his time with a loon, lectured me for trespassing on private property, and then shut up immediately when I shoved the photographs in front of him. I then produced the painting, and the police officer took both it and the photographs over to another officer. An hour later a crime scene unit was at the well.

A few days later, I learned that the abandoned farm was owned by none other than my landlord, who had been the subject of an investigation over his disappeared business partner over a decade ago. A police investigation found nothing, and the disappearance of the business partner went into the unsolved cases file. The skeleton at the bottom of the well proved to be the missing business partner with identification made by dental records. The decomposition of the body had been speeded by the use of chemicals -- first sulfuric acid when there were a few feet of water in the well, and then lime, repeated applications of lime, when the well went dry. Analysis of the skull found a fatal blow to the head. A watch with my landlord's initials engraved on the back was found at the bottom of the well pretty much sealing his fate. It must have been dropped long after the body was dumped as it showed no signs of corrosion. The crime lab also reported that the painting had the name of my landlord scratched into the canvas just above the image of the falling man. The painting was signed by the missing business partner. As I sat in the office of the crime lab after giving a formal deposition, a technician informed me with a sense of amazement that the substance on the canvas was not paint at all. "It's mud."

The End

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Version 4


	14. The Fears of Albert Weik

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meet Albert Weik -- a petty, mean-spirited man of a type all too familiar to most of us. Albert Weik, however, has a special talent, or curse, in that "worst fears" which he spouts regularly at family reunions always come true eventually.

The Fears of Albert Weik

by Nikki Little

 

Another family reunion. And there's no way out without disappointing my father. Oh, how I hate those reunions. Every five or so years my father drives my mother and me down to Kentucky for a gathering of all my redneck, racist, bigoted relatives. You know the type. They're the rural folk dressed in near rags who spout off against every hot button issue you can think of. They're the poor folk, the "good Christian" folk, who keep putting the worst type of Republican politicians in office. Almost everything the women cook -- God forbid that one of their men be seen in the kitchen! -- is fried in lard. Yuck. I'm a fish-eating vegetarian myself. Usually the only thing on the table that is something I normally eat is bread. They use lard to make the bread, too. The vegetables all have shredded ham or bacon in them. I usually carry several bars of chocolate with me and nibble on that while everybody else wolfs down their meat, potatoes, and gravy. Just about all of my cousins are over 300 pounds. A few are clearly over 400 pounds. They look gross -- like beach balls with arms and legs. I'm five feet tall and a pear-shaped size twelve. I'm the skinniest adult female in the family -- and I'm not skinny by anybody's standards. I'm the only person in the entire bunch who looks healthy. The rest of them all look like they'd drop over dead from a heart attack if they had to make a quick sprint for the bathroom after a feast of everything cooked in lard.

The worst person at my family reunions is Uncle Al. He's the one who's always spouting off about the "damn niggers." He's married to one of my father's sisters who happens to be a school teacher in an urban school where -- you guessed it -- over half of the students are black. Unlike most teachers, I hear that my Aunt Ellen keeps her mouth shut about what goes on at the school. She knows her husband well and keeps silent on anything that might trigger another round of bigoted ranting. My Aunt Ellen is the most enlightened of my Kentucky relatives. She's the first person in our family line to graduate from college. Rumor has it that she's a Democrat, but she never ever talks about anything political. She keeps her mouth shut. Her cooking is awful and she's just as big as the rest of my relatives. For a teacher, however, being over 300 pounds can be an advantage when you're dealing with some seriously difficult kids. "Large and in-charge" she sometimes jokes.

There's a funny thing I've noticed about my Uncle Al. At every family reunion that I can remember, he has always pontificated at length about his "worst fear." When I was a tiny child and too young to remember anything, my father tells me that Uncle Al went on and on that his "greatest fear" was that that "damn Lyndon Johnson" would sign the Civil Rights Act that was being debated in Congress. Uncle Al just couldn't stand to see black people lining up to vote on election day. My father tells me that he hates Catholics almost as much -- even when they're white. Sure enough, old Uncle Al's "worst fear" came true. That was only the first one.

At the first family reunion that I was old enough to remember, Uncle Al ranted and raved about Nixon's supposed environmental sympathies. Now most people these days, even Republicans, have a bit of a soft spot for the Environmental Protection Agency. After all, even Republicans enjoy nature. Lots of them are hunters who don't want to see their favorite duck hunting sites fouled by pollution. Uncle Al was implacable, however. His "worst fear" was that Nixon would sign a bill creating a national agency to protect the environment. Anything that encroached on private property rights was "socialism" to Uncle Al. He owned some land that had valuable timber on it. I figured that explained his hostility to environmental protection. Uncle Al's "worst fear" came true.

At the next family reunion, I was a teenaged tomboy who could outclimb any of the boys up a tree. With my shirt, blue jeans, and short hair, most people couldn't even tell that I was a girl. The dreaded Uncle Al was there, and I remember him teasing my father that he needed to feed me better so I'd look like a proper Kentucky girl. I looked over at the other girls around my age to see what a "proper Kentucky girl" looked like. Chubby with big breasts, big hips, and a big butt. Even then I realized that junior high-aged girls should not look like that. The girls who were my age looked like they were in their twenties. I seriously doubted that any of them could climb a tree even ten feet up. This reunion took place around the time that the Watergate scandal was filling the newspapers. Uncle Al's "worst fear" was that people would elect some "naïve, idealistic Democrat" president in 1976 as a reaction to Watergate. In 1976, Americans elected Jimmy Carter president. He was an honest, honorable man with some admirable ideas, but I remember that he didn't seem to accomplish much. Congress blocked most of what he wanted. I do remember that he shot himself in the foot by bringing back draft registration, however. Sometimes I wonder how much that had to do with him losing in 1980.

The years went by and the next family reunion came with the U.S. economy in the tank. Somehow, I had started to think, the U.S. economy was always in the tank. Little did I realize then that the downward slide was just beginning. Uncle Al ignored the state of the economy and focused on one of his favorite bete noirs: the Russians -- or, as we knew them back then, the Soviets. As I nibbled on chocolate ignoring the feast of fatty meats and gravies before me, Uncle Al expressed his "greatest fear" that our next president, whether Carter or Reagan, would "make nice" with the Russians. Sure enough, it eventually happened. The Cold War ended and Americans even went to Russia as Peace Corps Volunteers. Once again, one of Uncle Al's "worst fears" coming true had made our country -- and the world, this time -- a better place. The "Peace Dividend," however, never arrived.

The next reunion came, and dear old Uncle Al was in high dudgeon. Illegal immigration had become a hot-button issue with so many factory jobs disappearing due to the bipartisan love affair with "free trade." This time the pontificating blowhard's "greatest fear" was that Reagan would sign an immigration bill granting amnesty to at least some long-term illegal immigrants. I didn't care much for illegal immigration myself, but the thought of suddenly just rounding up all the Latin-American illegals and dumping them on the other side of the Rio Grande, as dear old Uncle Al wanted to do, was too much for me. They may have been illegals, but they were still human beings. I doubted that Mexico was prepared to suddenly have ten million or more destitute people suddenly dumped just inside their borders. Sure enough, during his second term, Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act which not only made it illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants, but also provided an amnesty to about three million long-term illegal immigrants. The amnesty may not have been popular, but it was the humane thing to do. It was one of the few compassionate things that Reagan did. Once again, one of Uncle Al's "greatest fears" had come true. I climbed a tree twenty feet up to escape his mouth. Clouds of cigarette smoke from Uncle Al and most of the other men there swirled below me like Los Angeles smog on a bad day.

The summer of 1989 was our next reunion. I remember the year because it was the summer just after George H. W. Bush had been elected. This reunion was perhaps a bit less miserable for me because I found out that the husband of one of my cousins was a chess player like me. I took a chess set with me and spent most of the reunion playing chess. I was enjoying myself until dear old Uncle Al sat down at the same picnic table to watch us play. He wasted no time being offensive.

"Good Lord, girl! What age are you, now? About 30? You're still skinny and flat-chested. Don't you ever eat?"

"I'm a fish-eating vegetarian. I eat well, but I eat healthy. I never count calories. I think it's pretty obvious that I'm not starving to death." I stood up and poked a hip. I had finally acquired a hint of hips and a butt. Creepy old Uncle Al looked me up and down in a way that made me feel really uncomfortable.

"Well, I'll be. You still look like a boy, though." I was wearing a shirt and blue jeans. I made a point of it that I would wear dresses to family reunions from then on. Uncle Al lit up a cigarette and clouds of smoke drifted over the chessboard. My chess-playing companion and I both fled. I went up a tree to my usual perch to escape the smoke and my chess-playing companion went and got his wife -- one of my blimp cousins -- and left. Down below I could hear easily as Uncle Al began to hold court with other male relatives. This time his "greatest fear" was that our new President George H. W. Bush would cave in on his "no new taxes" pledge and raise taxes to deal with spiraling deficits from the Reagan years. Dear old Uncle Al was one of those antitax zealots who seemed to think that taxation equals socialism -- which in his eyes was the greatest of all evils. Considering that he worked for the Social Security Administration and was a federal government employee, I found this to be an amusing irony. I seriously doubted that he would be "pure" enough in the future to refuse his social security check, either. Sure enough, a year later our Republican President made a compromise with the Democrats to raise taxes to avoid draconian cuts in social welfare spending. It was certainly the responsible thing to do given that unemployment and poverty were rising. Once again, Uncle Al's "greatest fear" had come true. It was a relief to me that our first President Bush, unlike the second one, was deep down inside a responsible and reflective man.

Our next reunion came just before the elections of 1994. It was fall and the leaves had turned color in Kentucky. When the day of the reunion came, we had gotten lucky: it was one of those warm-as-summer days in late October. I wore a summer dress that came down to just above my knees. It was probably the most feminine clothing I had ever worn to a family reunion. Even at this late date, however, the tomboy in me was still balking at make-up. I applied mascara and absolutely nothing else. I had always hated the idea of having gunk on my face, and lipstick was absolutely out of the question. I searched out my fellow chessplayer and set up the chessboard on a picnic table. He looked at me a bit surprised and finally asked, "Are you the same girl I played chess with at the last reunion?" I guess my appearance in a dress was a bit of a shock for everyone. We sat down to play chess and I won game after game after game. Five years ago I had only won perhaps two out of every three. He wasn't as good as me, but he did have some skill. This time his play in every game was marred by inexplicable blunders. The reason for his mistakes was obvious. He was spending more time looking at me than at the board. After about one hour his wife -- who had completely blimped out in the last five years and now looked to be barely able to walk -- joined us. Seeing her close up made me realize just why my chess-playing companion could not keep his eyes off me. Compared to his wife, I looked like a movie star. Her facial features were buried under a mattress of fat, and just under her chin was a huge glob of gelatinous flesh. I almost gagged. He excused himself and walked off with her. Another of my relatives announced to us all that dinner was ready.

Ah! Another family reunion feast of greasy meat, potatoes, greasy gravy, and all sorts of fried-in-lard goodies. I did my usual thing. I ate the bread and nibbled on chocolate. No one said a word to me. No one ever did. No one ever seemed to notice that I was not partaking of the feast. They were too busy shoveling. Gag. After about twenty minutes of furious shoveling, everyone, except me of course, appeared glutted to the gills. Uncle Al, stuffed as the rest, now made use of his pulpit. Even though two years had gone by since Clinton was elected, Uncle Al was still furious and railed against the "damn hippie" in the White House. He lit up along with the other men and they quickly fogged the air with noxious clouds. This time his greatest fear was that the "damn hippie" would be in office for a full eight years and be a "wimpy peacenik" on foreign policy. I got up to flee the smoke and dear old Uncle Al loudly noted that my ass was getting to be rather impressive. I gave him a dirty look and went straight up the tree from where I glared downwards in smoldering resentment. When you consider what came afterwards, the "wimpy peacenik" actually served our nation quite well. He was thoughtful and deliberative in making foreign policy decisions. Once again Uncle Al's "greatest fear" came true.

Our next reunion was held a year earlier than usual for some reason and took place in the dead heat of summer. I wore the same summer dress that I had worn to the last reunion and failed to realize the mistake of that. I had taken my chess set again, but my chess-playing compatriot was nowhere to be seen. One of my male relatives informed me that the chessplayer's wife had died last summer from a stroke. I can't say I was surprised but I kept my thoughts to myself. As I was walking back to the car to put the chess set away, I ran into Uncle Al who looked at me a moment and then asked, "Is that the same dress you wore to the last reunion?" I nodded in the affirmative. "It looks like it's stretched pretty tight in the hips and backside." I pulled on the material and it was loose in the hips the same as it had been four years ago. Uncle Al laughed that he had gotten me to check. He was being an ass, as usual. Dinner was the same grotesque affair as always, and Uncle Al did his usual after everyone had finished their ritual twenty minutes of shoveling. This year his "greatest fear" was was that the scandal-plagued Bill Clinton would somehow wriggle out and escape being impeached. It was the year of Monica, and I remember that our hound dog President was being pursued relentlessly by the Republicans and the media over something that I thought should have been a private matter. Clinton did end up getting impeached for having lied about sexual encounters with Miss Lewinsky, but the Senate dismissed all the charges. Uncle Al's "greatest fear" came true once more. I thought that if lying about sex were a legal offense, there'd be nobody left to guard the prisons. I asked creepy Uncle Al if he had ever lied about sex. "Never!" he declared. "So you deny you've been lusting after me since I turned 30, if not earlier?" Uncle Al went completely silent and backed away.

At our last reunion, George W. Bush had just "won" his second term in office. Uncle Al was ebullient and enjoyed rubbing the face of the only known and open Democrat in the family -- me -- into the mud. As for "greatest fears," he didn't seem to have any this time. His beloved "President Dubya" was a mean, nasty reactionary's dream come true. He also found time to rib me for no longer being "an underfed, skinny stick." This was the first reunion I had ever attended in which I carried enough weight to look normal and healthy. I really didn't mind at all as it was certainly better than watching my face shrivel up as happens to so many middle-aged women who remain stick-thin. I also happened to like how I looked in a dress. The ribbing didn't really bother me at all until dear old Uncle Al magnanimously reminded me that I was still flat-chested. I'm sure my face dropped like a stone. My cousins of my age, male and female both, nearly all appeared to have passed the 300-pound mark. They looked gross and were even more disgusting at the outdoor dinner tables as they shoveled in massive quantities of the meat, potatoes, and gravy that I had long refused to eat. Now in my mid-forties, I wondered how many of them would still be around ten years from now. In my family, lots of people suffered a crippling stoke or heart attack in their early fifties and died by their mid-fifties. Uncle Al lit cigarette after cigarette and blew the smoke in my face. As I had done several times before, I escaped by climbing my favorite tree overlooking the tables to my now-familiar perch at about twenty feet. Uncle Al seemed surprised when he looked up at me. Just because I now had some meat on my hips, bottom, and thighs didn't mean that I couldn't climb. "Pervert!" I yelled as he walked directly under the tree and stared up at me. I was wearing a dress.

Now I await our next reunion. I am dreading it, but I can't think of a realistic excuse not to attend. Dear old Uncle Al is said to be planning to attend, although I suspect this will be the last reunion he ever attends. Years of heavy cigarette smoking have finally caught up with him. He has emphysema and tires easily. He collects disability payments from Social Security. I'm sure he'll tease me relentlessly over having filled out to a rather plump size twelve. Dear old Uncle Al will probably make public note of me finally having gotten a pair of breasts and say that I now look like a "proper Kentucky girl." Never mind that the rest of "proper Kentucky girls" my age now look like something you'd expect to see at a circus. I've seen them in photographs. A couple of them, short as I am, are clearly over 400 pounds and can barely walk. A lifetime of shoveling in meat, potatoes, and gravy exacting its price. I can just imagine the torrent of worst fears that will come spewing out of his mouth now that we have a black man in the White House. He will probably spout about our new president being an "evil socialist" who "wants to redistribute the hard-earned wealth of productive members of our society." Every one of Uncle Al's "worst fears" has come true, and each one of his "worst fears" coming true has made our country a better place for most of us. Come on Uncle Al -- you bastard, you -- just one more rant. Just one more wild-eyed ranting and raving before your mean, nasty corpse starts to rot. Maybe this country will become humane and civilized at last -- no thanks to people like you. Once more up the tree -- I can still climb as well as ever -- and then no more.

 

The End


	15. Kitty Take a Walk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A disabled elderly woman and the daughter who cares for her find unexpected joy in a strange little game involving a small cat figurine that was once a perfume bottle.

Kitty Take a Walk

by Nikki Little

 

I buried my mother exactly four months ago. It had been just her and me in the house for five long years. My mother was disabled by a stroke sixteen years ago and about ten years ago I moved in to help care for her. It took my father and me both to take care of my mother. When my father died unexpectedly five years ago, I was left to take care of my mother alone. No help from my brother at all. It was my problem. Five long hard years of doing everything alone.

The only bit of fun we ever had was a strange game which centered around an old empty Avon perfume spray bottle that looked like a cat. You took the head off to reveal the spray nozzle. You could never tell that it was two pieces just by looking at it. It was pure white with the eyes represented by sparkling crystals which would reflect even the tiniest bit of light in a dark room. Light from another room, moonlight streaming in through a window, even light coming through the curtains from a distant street lamp was enough to make the eyes sparkle. The little white cat had an enormous grin on its face. It seemed almost alive. Mom and I nicknamed the little figurine “Kitty.”

The game was secretively moving the cat figurine from wherever it might be sitting to a new location. I moved the cat figurine the first time. I did it in the middle of the night when Mom was asleep. The normal location had been on a round end table with several plants located directly in front of a window and just to the left of my mother's antique roll-up desk in a cramped, crowded corner of the room. I picked up “Kitty” and put her – I was always sure the cat was a she – in the living room on an end table mixed in with some bird figurines. Mom loved her knickknacks. They were everywhere in the house.

It took Mom three days to notice that “Kitty” was gone from her usual location. She asked me because she hated for anything to be in the wrong place. She couldn't stand for curtains to hang slightly askew, for picture frames to be slightly crooked, or even for the phone cord to be twisted. Constantly straightening these things for her drove me nuts, but I suffered in silence. When Mom asked me about “Kitty,” I feigned total ignorance of the affair. “Kitty just didn't get up and take a walk!” sternly declared my mother. My mother stubbornly maneuvered herself with her walker from room to room looking for “Kitty.” I wondered if my silence was cruel, but didn't want to back out of my little game. I needed to have some fun just to avoid insanity in my restricted little world. Mom found “Kitty” in the living room on the end table in the corner next to the window looking out to the carport. “Kitty” hid well in among all those birds. Mom poked “Kitty” triumphantly in her walker bag and ferried her back to her usual place on the round end table with all the plants just to the left of her roll-up desk.

I left “Kitty” alone for a few days, and then, again in the middle of the night, transferred the grinning little cat to a more obvious location on top of the TV set. Mom had a few bird figurines on top of the TV set as well, and I thought “Kitty” would be happy among all those birds. “Kitty” just grinned away on top of the TV set.

Mom found “Kitty” the next morning. “Kitty take another walk?” she asked me. This time my mother did not move “Kitty” back to the round end table with all the plants. She just left “Kitty” on top of the TV with the bird figurines. This was strange behavior for my mother. She always had to have everything in its right spot. “Kitty” spent perhaps a week on top of the TV and then disappeared. I went into the bedroom with my mother's roll-up desk to check the usual location for “Kitty” on the round end table with all the plants. “Kitty” was missing from the round end table as well. Sometime during the day when I wasn't looking, my mother had snatched “Kitty.” I swear I saw a grin on her face that evening.

I searched high and low for “Kitty” the next day and couldn't find her. I was totally mystified. I was also having trouble believing that my mother, who seemed to find no joy in anything, had played a prank on me.

Three days later I saw a flash from familiar crystal eyes coming from the middle shelf on a bookcase with sliding glass doors. Kitty had managed to hide from me in a spot in the bookcase that was hidden in shadow through most of the day. I felt a childish surge of mischief, snatched “Kitty,” and searched for a hiding place for the peripatetic cat. The game had begun.

That was four years ago, one year after my father had died. It was the first time my mother showed any signs of interest in life. For four years we traded hiding places for Kitty becoming ever more inventive as the supply of familiar hiding places dwindled. My mother was limited to hiding places within her reach. As she used a walker to get around, she could not, like me, stand on a chair or stepstool to reach higher places. She couldn't go down the basement stairs, either. For me to hide “Kitty” downstairs was out of the question. Sometimes I hid “Kitty” in high locations such as on top of the curio cabinet in the dining room or on top of the corner cabinet in the same dining room. Since my mother could not reach “Kitty” to hide her, I always, a day or two later, relocated “Kitty” to a location within reach. Neither one of us ever admitted to moving “Kitty.” Sometimes we talked about the phenomenon of “Kitty” taking a walk while we weren't looking. We had long discussions of all the possibilities: “Kitty” was being moved by a ghost in the house, “Kitty” was possessed by a restless spirit, “Kitty” was possessed by the spirit of a cat that used to live in the house. We even discussed the possibility that “Kitty” was a guardian angel making sure that we kept a sense of wonder in our lives.

And then Mom died. I was completely alone in the house. I had no one to talk to. No one to exchange hiding places for “Kitty” with. My brother was married to his banking job and a grossly obese, lazy wife who spent every dime he had on endless trips to the hospital emergency room because of migraine headaches. He certainly had no time for me. I had inherited enough money from my mother to support me for about a year if I watched my expenses very carefully and suffered no unexpected financial blows such as the car dropping dead. There was no public transportation in my city. The car was an absolute necessity. An expensive necessity. I had to rejoin the workforce after ten years of being out. I was fifty-eight years old. A sensation of doom hung over me like a shroud. I remember sometimes staring at the little cat figurine for as long as an hour at a time. I missed the little game that my mother and I had played. I hadn't realized just how much a part of my life our little bit of mischief had become.

I picked “Kitty” up from the last place I had hidden her and returned her to the round end table in front of the window by my mother's roll-up desk. I thought “Kitty” would be happy to return to the company of all those plants. Most of the plants were African Violets, but there was an Aloe Vera plant, too, and a flower that I did not recognize. I left “Kitty” on the round end table intending never to move her again. The game was over.

The job hunt went as expected: no one ever called back. I kept dialing down my hopes to the point that I began applying for restaurant jobs just like the desperate college graduates who seemed willing to slit each others' throats for a chance to wait tables part-time at Applebee's. Even the restaurants ignored my applications. I was fifty-eight years old. In the local job market, the only employed people you ever saw over fifty were those lucky affluent people in civil service jobs who had family wealth and political connections. I went downstairs and stared at my father's old Marlin hunting rifle on the gun rack in the furnace room. I opened the dusty drawer of the gun rack and found leftover 30-30 Winchester ammunition for the rifle. I considered the ever-increasing possibility that my father's hunting rifle would be the end of me when the money ran out. I spent more and more time downstairs staring at the rifle.

And then it happened. One day when I was at my mother's roll-up desk dealing with utility bills that were a never-ending drain, I saw that “Kitty” was gone from the round end table. Nothing but an empty space among the plants where “Kitty” had sat. Had I moved the figurine myself I wondered? I certainly couldn't remember it. I didn't find “Kitty” until the next evening.

I had gone downstairs for another sojourn with my father's old Marlin hunting rifle. There on the narrow shelf above the one drawer on the gun rack was “Kitty.” The figurine's crystal eyes sparkled in the dim light. The grin was wider than ever.

“No! No! Not now!” the figurine seemed to say. “I want to play! Don't you have time for me?”

I blinked. The figurine's Cheshire cat grin spread ever wider. The eyes sparkled ever brighter.

“The game is not over!” whispered the grinning feline with fixed, unmoving lips. The voice filled the room, but seemed to come from nowhere. “We have much more playtime ahead of us!”

I closed my eyes. I was hearing things. Or maybe I was finally losing my mind. 

“I want to play!” whispered the feline. The figurine was in front of me, but the voice seemed to come from the entire room.

I picked up “Kitty” and carried her back to the round end table next to my mother's roll-up desk. Back among the African Violets and the Aloe Vera plant. Would I have shot myself that night if the cat figurine had not been on the gun rack shelf? I have no way of knowing for sure.

I didn't even notice the next time “Kitty” disappeared. I found her again the next time I went downstairs to my father's gun rack. “Kitty” was on the gun rack shelf again, eyes sparkling and alive.

“There's always tomorrow!” insisted “Kitty.” “Play with me! We've always had so much fun together!” The voice echoed in my head.

I moved “Kitty” back upstairs to the round end table with the African Violets and Aloe Vera plant. A day later a pizza parlour called and wanted me to work in the kitchen 28 hours a week. Seven hours a day for four days a week. Minimum wage. No benefits. It was better than nothing. Every time I came home from the pizza parlour, “Kitty” was gone from the round end table. I always immediately searched for her and found her within 15 minutes. I always carried her back to the round end table. Every time I found “Kitty” in a new location, she grinned away in a manner that seemed positively alive, and her eyes sparkled with mischief.

The End

This story is completely original, and is entirely mine.

Version 2


	16. Senior Portrait

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's 1976. A senior girl in high school has spent her entire life as a tomboy. Rarely wearing a dress. Never wearing makeup. Almost never varying her hairdo. So what happens when she shows up the day of the school yearbook portraits with a new hairdo, a new dress, and wearing makeup for the first time ever? A portrait of a lost era.

Title: Senior Portrait  
Category: Fiction » Young Adult  
Author: nikkilittle  
Language: English, Rating: Rated: T  
Genre: Drama/General  
Published: 06-19-16, Updated: 06-19-16  
Chapters: 13, Words: 6,742  
Chapter 1: Chapter 1  
Chapter 1: "The Night Before"

It was 1976. I think I was lucky to go to high school in the 1970s. It was in the age before the Internet. There was no Facebook. There was no Twitter. There was no YouTube. There was no cyberbullying. It was the night before the yearbook portraits were taken. My copper-red hair was shoulder-length and slightly curly. People called it my "lion's mane." I wasn't much for glamour and didn't really want to fool with my hair. Other than shampooing and an occasional haircut at the barbershop, I didn't do much with it. Oh, yeah. I got my haircuts at the barbershop with all the men. Cheaper that way. Going to the barbershop was all by itself enough to get me labeled weird. The year of my senior yearbook portrait, however, was different. That year, I went to a salon to get my hair done. It was my first trip ever to a hair salon.

"Off with the lion's mane!" I told the hair stylist. I opted for the classic "Pageboy" cut. The stylist wanted to straighten my hair, but I declined. "So I'll have a curly pageboy," I said. I sat quietly in the hair stylist's chair hoping she would finish quickly so I could get home and get my usual four hours of homework – oh, how I hated the backbreaking homework load! – out of the way. By the time I ate dinner and finished my homework, it was usually time to go to bed. Sometimes I had as much as seven hours of homework. Those nights I didn't get to bed until midnight, and was exhausted the next day. I was number four academically in the senior class, but when I rode the bus to school already exhausted before the schoolday had even begun, I sometimes envied the idiots who the rode the bus with their hands in their pockets. No books. The idiots never did their homework. I envied them for the full night of sleep they always got.

Chapter 2: Chapter 2  
Chapter 2: "Morning"

I got all prepped for school early that day. I had on a new dress, I had a new easy-to-maintain hairdo, and I had a special task to do before I left for school. I walked next door to a friend's house. She had agreed to apply makeup to my face before we left for school.

"It's about time you had some makeup on your face!" my glamourpuss friend scolded me. "Let's see what you really look like when you've got makeup on your face like most of the other girls."

"I've heard too many horror stories of girl's faces breaking out in hives after applying makeup. I never had any interest in trying. I only agreed to let you put makeup on my face because it's powdered minerals."

"I refuse to use anything else. I found out the hard way that I'm allergic to nickel. Most cheap makeup is contaminated with traces of nickel and lead. Some of it even has arsenic."

"Oh, tasty. Skip the lipstick on me. I don't want to swallow any of that stuff."

"I don't have any lipstick. I don't use it, either. You don't need lipstick with that babyface."

"Lightly, please. Don't cover my freckles. I don't want to look like I'm wearing a mask."

My friend always delighted in telling me that I had a babyface. She couldn't figure out how a short, skinny, tiny 100-pound waif like me could have chipmunk cheeks and a chubby-looking heart-shaped face. She spent about ten minutes fussing with my face, and then applied mascara to my eyelashes.

"All done!" she crowed, as she hustled me to the vanity in her bedroom. "You look like Jill Haworth in the movie 'Exodus'!"

"Who is Jill Haworth?" I asked.

My friend rolled her eyes. She, her father, and her mother were all movie buffs. I didn't have time to go to movies. I was always doing homework. I used weekends to catch up on writing papers. I utterly despised "term projects." Just another sneaky trick used by teachers to pile on even more homework. You might think that I hated school. You would be correct. I hated school with a passion. I was number four on the academic lists. And I hated school. "Why does school have to be such an exhausting slog?" I sometimes asked my teachers. They all gave the same reply: "It's the same for teachers, too."

We walked to the car in her driveway. My friend's mother had agreed to drive us to school so our new hairdos, new dresses, and fancy makeup wouldn't get messed up on the school bus before our pictures were taken. A wise bit of premonition. I heard at lunch that day that all the school buses were zoos with kids messing up each other's hair, clothes, and makeup.

Chapter 3: Chapter 3  
Chapter 3: "Period One"

No homeroom in my high school, thankfully. In junior high school, I called it "homework destruction period" as the idiots would try to destroy homework done by the smart kids. I kept all my books in a bookbag to keep my precious homework out-of-reach. It was insane to try to do anything in homeroom. It was always pure chaos.

I was stopped on my way in to my first period Chemistry class before I even reached my desk. "Lecherous Larry" I called him. I gave him that name because he was always hitting on the prettiest girls in the class. They always pushed him away with the tip of an index finger, usually accompanied by an exclamation of "Ewwwwwwwww!" He had never paid any attention to me.

"A new girl in class! When did you arrive? And do you have a date for senior prom?"

I looked at Lecherous Larry startled at his sudden attentiveness. Two more boys quickly appeared beside me, vying for my attention. I was surrounded and suddenly felt downright dizzy.

"Cat got your tongue, doll?" asked Lecherous Larry while staring down the other two boys. "How about going to see a movie this weekend with Sir Larry!" The other two boys continued to watch silently hoping to see me cut down Lecherous Larry. Were they hoping for a chance, too?

"The bell's about to ring. I need to get to my desk." I moved toward my desk and Lecherous Larry followed me. The other two boys looked at the clock and scrambled for their seats. I sat down in my desk which was the front desk in the row next to the windows. Lecherous Larry stared at me.

"You can't sit there, doll. Some mousy little tomboy named Nichole sits there."

"I am Nichole," I said. Lecherous Larry stood there staring at me with his mouth hanging open and suddenly erupted.

"Nichole is as plain as dirt! You couldn't be Nichole!" The bell rang and the teacher walked in. She had heard the exchange. She scribbled on a piece of paper, ripped off the carbon for herself, and handed the white part to Lecherous Larry.

"You're out of your seat and the bell has rung. Tardy." The paper was a detention slip. The entire class erupted in laughter. What made it especially funny was that this teacher almost never gave a detention slip. At least in our class. Lecherous Larry slinked back to his seat with his cheeks crimson red. Every once in awhile, I could see him staring at me out of the corner of my eye. He couldn't believe it was me. The other two boys stared, too.

Chapter 4: Chapter 4  
Chapter 4: "Period Two"

Advanced Placement History. History for college credit. This teacher lectured the entire period and never asked any questions. When taking attendance, he walked down the aisles with a seating chart in his hand and wrote any absences on a sheet of paper. Then he entered absences into his grade book. I don't think I'd ever heard him mention one of our names. As a result, I knew the names of almost no one in this class, and almost no one knew my name. It was a bizarre class.

The instant I walked in the door, the boys mobbed me as if I were a new exchange student. I had six boys around me all competing against each other for my attention. I knew the names of none of them. I quickly squelched the ardour of the boys.

"I'm flattered at all the attention, guys, but you do all realize that I'm Nichole?"

"Who's Nichole?"

Now this caught me by surprise. I walked over to my seat.

"I sit here."

Now the boys all looked at each other not quite believing it. Finally one spoke.

"You're the flat-chested tomboy with the wild hair?"

"That's me." I pulled my dress tight over my non-existent bust to emphasize the complete lack of bustline there. They got the message. They were all hitting on the flatsie. Oh, the horror! Finally one spoke.

"Damn! Makeup is gettin' so good these days ya can't tell who's good-lookin' and who ain't!"

The boys all lost interest as soon as they discovered who their glamour girl was and drifted back to their seats. "Good riddance!" I thought as they all walked away. They had never paid any attention to me before. I'm sure I would have spurned any one of them who had continued to express an interest.

Near the end of the period, an announcement came that yearbook portraits for Seniors would begin. We were to be called by the first letter of our last names. The order of the letters was to be random. I got lucky and was in the second group. At this point, of course, all teachers with Seniors in their classes gave up trying to teach with groups constantly coming and going. The portraits were a strictly perfunctory affair with only about ten seconds being spent on each student. Three quick shots and pick one later for the yearbook. Pure factory assembly line. Third period had already started when my portraits were taken.

Chapter 5: Chapter 5  
Chapter 5: "Period 3"

Teachers watched us all like ravenous hawks as we stood in line. The metal shop teacher, a big, burly Russian Bear type built like a Mountain Gorilla yanked out of line anyone who dared to muss the appearance of another student. The teachers all knew about the chaos that had occurred on the buses and were determined to prevent a repeat. Quite a few of the girls had compacts out and were touching up and repairing makeup. As I watched them, I silently gave thanks for my total lack of interest in makeup. They all looked like self-absorbed princesses to me. I did not want to be one of them.

I had somehow made it through two passings in the hallway without anyone successfully messing up my makeup. I had been very wary and had avoided groups of girls in the hallways. I had buried myself inside groups of boys. None of the boys ever tried to mess up a girl's makeup. Only the girls did that. I did get two pinches on the ass, but I laughed at that. I had nothing back there to pinch.

When my turn was over, period three had begun and I walked swifly to my next class. Art class. Never any homework. Thank heaven. I took advantage of the opportunity to duck into the restroom before returning to class. No one in there. A rare opportunity. After finishing my business and washing my hands, I lingered in front of the mirror in front of the hand sinks. How could such a simple thing as makeup make me so unrecognizable to so many people? The makeup did not cover my freckles although it did make them less obvious. I looked less pale. Was that it? I didn't think the makeup made me look prettier, it just made me look different. It hit me that with makeup on, I looked more like an adult and less like a kid. Was that it? Was that really the difference? I scurried out of the restroom with my head full of thoughts.

The teacher was giving a study hall, and since most of us in there were grinds, everybody had his or her nose buried in a book. Everyone was taking advantage of an opportunity to catch up on homework. No one even looked up as I entered. I took my seat and promptly buried my nose in my French textbook. I had a test coming the next day. One period of blessed peace. No one tried to hit on me.

Chapter 6: Chapter 6  
Chapter 6: "Period 4"

Period four was a study hall, so I went to the library and signed in. Students had the option to go to the library during study halls, and I took advantage of every opportunity to go. The library was quiet. Study halls were almost always zoos, and it was impossible to get anything done in them. Only the geeks and grinds went to the library, it seemed. I thought I would be left alone in the library, but I was wrong. While I was signing in, a football player cornered me.

Townsend, a wide receiver on the varsity football team. One of the golden boys in the school. Big, muscular, tall. He was trying to flirt with me. I was a full foot shorter than him. He also had a girlfriend. Big Boobs Barbara. Medium height. Perfect hourglass figure. Boobs the size of footballs. Face like a funhouse nightmare. Why was he trying to flirt with me?

"Hey little Red! I've never seen you around here before. Are you a new student?"

"No, I've been here since tenth grade."

"I've seen you before?"

"Yes, you have. Many times."

"I'm stumped. Who are you?"

"Nichole."

"I don't recognize the name."

"Of course not. You never asked."

"I'm sure I would have remembered you."

"This is the first time I've worn a dress and applied makeup. The hairdo is completely new, too."

"Never worn a dress before? Never worn makeup before?"

"Nope." I could see the gears grinding in his head. Slow realization washed over his face. He backed up from me with panic starting to appear in his eyes.

"No. It couldn't be. You couldn't be that flat-chested tomboy with the wild lion-like hair. You couldn't be."

I pulled my dress tight over my chest showing the complete lack of a bustline. I lifted my hair out showing the slight curls that were still there. The slight, fluffed curls that gave my hair the appearance of a lion's mane.

Mr. Wide Receiver, the glamour boy, fled. Didn't say a word. Just backed away and then fled. Oh, the shame! The everlasting shame! He had hit on a flatsie. I walked to an empty table way in the back among the stacks of books in the direction opposite to which Mr. Wide Receiver had fled. I pulled out my English class folder and started working on a composition that was almost finished and due on Friday. For the remainder of the period, out of sight back there in the stacks, I had blessed peace. Lunch, which took place in the middle of period 4, however, was a different story.

Chapter 7: Chapter 7  
Chapter 7: "Lunch"

Lunch at my high school was a daily nightmare. You had thirty minutes of which you spent fifteen standing in line. Then you walked around for five minutes looking for a place to sit. Various cliques had their "reserved" tables, and woe to anyone who sat in a "reserved" seat. Then you had ten minutes to eat, assuming no big shots poked you in the shoulder and demanded that you get up and give him or her your seat.

I had been in several fights with Queen Bees who had demanded that I get up and give up my seat. I always refused. Several times a Queen Bee had knocked my tray into the floor spilling my food all over the floor. The food was slop, but it was still lunch. I was five feet tall and 100 pounds, but I could fight like an angry lion, and I did whenever anyone dumped my food. The assistant principals never punished me for attacking someone who dumped my food. It was always the food dumper who got suspended. I'd get a lecture about learning to control my temper, but I always won in the end with the question, "How would you react if someone walked up to you, demanded that you give up your seat, and then dumped your food when you refused?" Then I lectured the assistant principal on the school's failure to clamp down on the bullies. There were articles in the local section of the newspaper about once a month complaining about unchecked bullying in the public school system. "Want me to tell my story to a newspaper reporter?" I'd ask. That shut up the administrators every time. They were terrified of the local press. And parents.

This lunch was different. I was in the midst of a bunch of girls in the line, and some of them were Queen Bees. No boys bothered me. The Queen Bee in front of me invited me to sit with the In Crowd at her table. There were literally no vacant seats in sight, so I accepted her invitation.

"So who are you?" asked the Queen Bee. "I've never seen you before."

"You've seen me many times," I answered. "You just never acknowledged my existence before."

"What's your name?"

"Nichole."

"I don't know anyone named 'Nichole.' There are only a few redhead girls in this school. You couldn't be any of them. You must be new."

"I've been going to this school since tenth grade. I just never wore a dress or makeup before. This is my first time. The hairdo is new, too."

The Queen Bees at the table all looked at each other with realization dawning. Their mouths all slowly dropped open.

"You're that tomboy, aren't you?"

"Yup."

The Queen Bees all looked at each other, and I could see that they were all getting angry.

"You're not sitting with us!" blurted the Queen Bee in front of me who had invited me to sit with her group. She stood up and grabbed my tray.

"Dump my tray and I'll tear you to pieces in front of the entire cafeteria. You know I can do it because you've seen me do it before."

The Queen Bee carried my tray to a table halfway accross the cafeteria with all of the school's social outcasts sitting at it.

"You sit with the freaks!" she said, and stalked away. Because she hadn't dumped my tray or placed it on the floor, there was no fight. She didn't spit in my food, either. I would have jumped her instantly if she had.

I looked at my dining companions. Two girls dressed entirely in black, two boys who obviously hadn't bathed in a week and smelled, and Reckless Ricky from the chess club who played second board on the chess team. I played first board, so Reckless Ricky knew me well. I gave him his chess club name because he always played for checkmate. Reckless Ricky did not blink when he saw me.

"You sure dress up nice. Strictly for the yearbook portrait, I presume?"

"Yup."

"Pity you don't show up to chess matches all dolled up like this. The opposing team members would all be so distracted they'd blunder all their games away in twenty-five moves."

Reckless Ricky winked at me. He was grinning.

"Would you believe you're the first person to recognize me at first sight today?"

"No surprise at all. Some of these guys actually think you're ugly just because you don't have makeup on. Imagine what that crowd of Queen Bees over there would look like without their flashy clothes, expensive hairdos, and expensive makeup. Without makeup, you'd be the belle of the ball in that crowd over there."

I hesitated. Was Reckless Ricky flirting with me? Come to think of it, this wasn't the first time he had told me that I looked just fine without makeup. I looked up at Reckless Ricky as the freaks at the table watched with interest. "When did you grow the moustache, Ricky?"

"Finally!" he shouted. "I've had it since the beginning of the year. I grew it over the summer. I've been wondering when somebody, anybody, would notice!"

The freaks began to giggle. A girl dressed entirely in black, possibly a friend of Ricky's, addressed him.

"Go on Ricky! Ask her! Trust me! She won't bite!"

Reckless Ricky looked embarrassed. He cleared his throat and then coughed.

"Ummmm... Do you have a date for the senior prom, yet?"

I looked at Reckless Ricky as if he were crazy. "Of course, not! Boys don't exactly line up to ask for dates from tomboys. Especially flat-chested tomboys with a 3.9 grade point average." Back in the 1970s, a 4.0 grade point average was the best you could do.

"Want to go with me?"

"Are you sure you want to go to a senior prom with all the snobby rich kids, especially considering how much it would cost?"

"It's a rite of passage."

"It's an expensive rite of passage."

"Do you want to go?"

"Why don't we skip the senior prom and go see a movie, instead? I've heard that some space epic titled 'Star Wars' is supposed to be released in the summer of 1977. Wouldn't that beat drinking Hawaiian Punch out of paper cups?"

"You really want to skip the senior prom?"

"Do you really want to spend a small fortune to spend a night with people like those Queen Bees over there who just evicted me from their table when they realized who I was?"

Reckless Ricky and I both looked over at the freaks we were sitting with.

"Are any of you going to the senior prom?" he asked.

All the freaks snorted at the same time as if we must be incredibly naive to even ask.

"We hate all these snobs we have to go to school with. You grinds, band geeks, and chess club geeks are the only people who would be caught dead sitting with us."

That answered that. I looked at my watch. Four minutes to eat. Four minutes to shovel. I hated lunch period.

Chapter 8: Chapter 8  
Chapter 8: "Period 5"

I made it through the hallways well enough, but just inside the entrance to my period 5 class, Advanced Placement English, I got mobbed again. Six boys this time. They pounced on me like yellow jackets on cut fruit at a picnic. A football player, center on the varsity team, moved in first.

"Well, well, well. I've never seen you before cutie pie. Just move into the district?"

Mathers. He was the only player on the football team with good grades. Rather well-mannered for a jock. He wasn't a total jerk. His girlfriend, a sort-of-chubby blond cheerleader with a spectacular hourglass figure, had said to friends of mine that he treated her fairly well. Her only complaint was that he would flirt with other girls even while on dates with her. A compulsive flirt. Oh, well. Most of the jocks were worse.

"I've been here since the beginning of the school year. You just never noticed me before."

The chess team's fourth board player, "Blunderin' Billie" as I called him, walked in the door at that precise moment, and, with a chessplayer's eye, quickly assessed the situation.

"I hate to break up the party guys, but this delectable bag of bones that you see before you is not anyone new. No, it's someone we all know who has a new hairdo and is wearing makeup and a dress for the first time that I know of. Gentlemen, this is your favorite tomboy, Nichole."

The six boys all took a step or two back to get a full-length look at me. Mathers' eyes popped open.

"No, it couldn't be. I'd always thought Nichole was kind of homely."

"I'm standing right here. So you always thought I was ugly and now suddenly I'm not ugly?"

"You sure look different with makeup on!"

"I'm only wearing a light dusting of makeup. Powdered minerals. And mascara. The popular girls who all sit together at a table during lunch probably wear at least three times as much goop on their faces."

Mathers furrowed his unibrow.

"Makes me wonder what those Princesses would look like without makeup," Mathers said with a completely straight face.

I laughed at hearing Mathers use the perjorative "Princesses" and also at watching his face as he looked increasingly horrified at the thought of what the popular girls looked like without their makeup.

"Have you ever seen your girlfriend without makeup?"

The bell rang right then and we all scrambled for our seats. If you weren't in your seat when the bell stopped ringing, you were tardy. Mathers didn't have time to reply. The big guy scrambled for his seat the same as the rest of us. Watching Mathers stuff his enormous frame into a tiny student desk was a daily moment of hilarity for the entire class. It reminded me of a bunch of circus clowns all climbing into a tiny car. The teacher entered and it was all business for the rest of the class until the bell rang.

Chapter 9: Chapter 9  
Chapter 9: "Period 6"

The worst thing about junior high school and high school is having to find time to go to the bathroom in the scant four minutes in between classes. Because of the paucity of class changing time, I carried all the books for my morning classes all morning, and all the books for my afternoon classes all afternoon. I only made three stops at my locker: just after arriving at school, during lunch, and after the last class. This period I needed to go, and dashed into the restroom that was on the same floor as my Trigonometry class, but at the opposite end of the hallway. No time to dawdle. There never was.

I was greeted just inside the doorway by a mob of Queen Bees.

"If you're not one of the club, you have to pay a user fee!" the ringleader declared. I didn't know her name. I scoffed and tried to push past her, but she stepped in front of me. I saw Lynette and Sara, two girls who had sat at the lunch table with me, in the group. I put my left hand up on the collar of the ringleader's dress.

"Such a pretty dress! Where did you get it? My dress came from the Bargain Basement at Elder-Beerman. It cost three dollars and ninety-nine cents. How much did your dress cost?"

Lynette tugged on the ringleader's sleeve and shook her head. I started to pull on the fabric of the ringleader's dress in a direction out of my way. Lynette gave the ringleader an insistent poke in the side.

"Let her pass! It's not worth the trouble!" hissed Lynette.

The ringleader looked at the other girls. Sara was also shaking her head. The ringleader stepped aside and I went into a stall to do my business. Outside the stall I could hear arguing. I also heard more girls enter the restroom.

"Are you nuts? That girl is the crazy tomboy who beats up anyone who so much as breathes on her lunch!"

"That's the little lion in jeans?"

"Yes! She must have gotten dressed up for her senior portrait! Didn't you recognize her?"

"Nope. Looks completely different. How did you recognize her?"

"I didn't. Heather invited her to sit with us at lunch. None of us recognized her at first. When Heather realized who she was, she snatched up her tray and put it down on the table with the freaks."

I heard another girl speak up. More coming and going.

"I'm done with this. Harassing other girls for money to use the bathroom is stupid. Have a nice life you all."

I heard the door open and shut. I wondered if the Queen Bees had all left. A moment later, the door opened and shut again as a new group, apparently unimpeded, entered and rushed to use the stalls. Time was getting short. I dashed to the sinks, washed my hands, and hit the door running. I made it into Trig class way down the hallway just as the bell started to ring. I thumped my butt down into my seat and dropped my bookbag on to the floor just as the bell stopped ringing. The teacher was writing on the blackboard.

I hated Trigonometry, but it was required for Freshman Calculus at nearly every college in the country. I tried to think of a use for the endless formulas I was required to memorize. I couldn't think of any. My math classes were the only classes in which I did not always make an "A." The teacher stopped in front of me while taking attendance. He looked at me. Looked at the rest of the class. Looked at me. "Slowpoke Sam" from the Chess Club on the other side of the class shouted at the teacher. I called him "Slowpoke Sam" because he had the chess style of a leisurely boa constrictor. He slowly and steadily moved a wall of pawns down the board toward you until you ran out of space to move. He played third board on the Chess Team.

"Teach! That's Nichole! We're both in the Chess Club. I'd recognize that curly copper hair anywhere!" Students in the rest of the class turned to stare at me, and the whispering began. The teacher cut the whispering short by beginning class as soon as he finished scribbling in his attendance book. An office assistant entered a moment later, and the Trig teacher handed over the absence list for the period. And so it began. More formulas. More problems. Ugh.

Nobody tried to flirt with me at the end of class because everybody knew who I was. There was something to be said for entering class at the very last moment.

Chapter 10: Chapter 10  
Chapter 10: "Period 7"

The foreign language classrooms were all on the other side of the building. Because of the high noise level in all of the foreign language classes, they were buried in a handful of academic classrooms in the Industrial Arts Wing. We were next to the Wood Shop, Metal Shop, Auto Shop, Welding, and Construction classes.

It was a mad dash out the side doors of the Academic Wing across the open courtyard to the Industrial Wing to get to my Period 7 French 4 class before the bell rang. The French teacher, a woman of course, did not strictly enforce the butt-in-seat-before-bell-stops-ringing rule. She always wandered in about a minute after the bell stopped ringing, and didn't count anyone tardy unless they came more than two minutes late. You could still get a tardy from an administrator if you were caught out in the halls after the bell stopped ringing, of course. It was the last period of the day, and everyone was always tired.

The bell rang right when I hit the doors of the Industrial Arts Wing. No administrators in the halls, thank heaven. I dashed into the French classroom a few seconds late, as usual. The teacher hadn't arrived yet. About thirty seconds later, an administrator walked by conducting a sweep for tardy students and class skippers. He caught our French teacher scurrying out of the faculty ladies' room.

"Women teachers, dear sir, are not blessed with bladders the size of a watermelon. And we do not come equipped with point-and-pee!"

She got caught about once a week in the sweeps, and she always said the same thing. We all waited for it.

"Humph!" And our French teacher entered the classroom. She had more personality than all the rest of the teachers in the school combined. Tall, slim, elegantly dressed, heavily made-up, and with a haughty demeanor, you could have easily mistaken her for genuine French, but she was American. She always took attendance in this class with a brief glance to count heads. There were only six of us. All girls. It was always obvious if someone was absent.

She stopped in front of me. She cocked her head. She lifted my newly cut hair with a pencil. Even back then teachers stuck to the rule of avoiding physical touch. It was before the era of Anita Hill and rampant accusations of sexual harassment, but teachers were still just a bit paranoid.

"Are you Nichole?"

"Who else would I be? When's the last time somebody sneaked into a French class?"

The other five girls burst out laughing. They had been staring at me ever since I sat down. I might have looked unfamiliar, but my voice in this tiny class, where we all knew each other well, was a dead give-away.

We immediately started class. Conversational French with a textbook from the Berlitz Schools. There had been a revolt by the foreign language teachers over curriculum a few years ago when enrollment in the second, third, and fourth-year classes dropped below five in every class. The problem was that students only completed half of the textbook every year and started out every year except for the first year at least a full year behind. Classes were misery for the students and impossible to teach. The school board finally agreed to let teachers use the first-year textbook for two full years. Afterwards, the teachers got to design their own third and fourth-year classes. Our teacher wanted students who stuck with her for four years to be able to actually speak some French by the time they graduated.

"Hier, Nichole etait laide, mais aujourd'hui, elle est belle," said the student next to me. Our teacher jerked her head. I understood every word.

"That's not nice! Apologize now!" It was unusual for our teacher to suddenly break into English in the middle of a lesson. Another girl joined the discussion.

"Mais, c'est vrai. Hier, Nichole etait invisible. Aujourd'hui, tous les garcons veulent un rendez-vous avec Nichole."

It became the topic of discussion for the day. Yesterday, I was ugly. Today all the boys thought I was beautiful and wanted a date. There were no boys in the class. There were no men around. The class became a furious denunciation of the shallow behavior of boys and men. "Shallow sniffing dogs" seemed to be the consensus opinion of the male sex. It was all in French. It was the best class ever.

Chapter 11: Chapter 11  
Chapter 11: "Aftermath"

I wore my dress for an additional two days. No makeup, though. No self-respecting tomboy would toss a shirt or pants into the dirty clothes after only one day. I wore my dress for three days before tossing it into the dirty clothes, not to be worn again until the night of the senior prom.

Most of the boys who had hit on me the day I wore makeup avoided me for the rest of the year. Whether it was embarrassment or just shame, I don't know. "Lecherous Larry" from my first period Chemistry class started to talk to me as if I were a person. He also stopped hitting on the prettiest girls in the class. He explained his changed behavior to me this way: "I realized that all these painted-up beauties were just ordinary girls spending a fortune on their vanity."

Townsend fled at the sight of me. He later dumped his girlfriend, "Big Boobs Barbara." Mathers talked to me as if I were a normal person. The big dopey galoot seemed completely unaware that he had anything to be ashamed of. He asked his sort-of-chubby blond cheerleader girlfriend if he could see her without makeup. Her reaction was near panic. She had acne scars. She wore makeup to cover up the scarring. Mathers did not dump his girlfriend. I kind of liked the big dope after finding that out. He was like Gomer Pyle with good grades.

In French class, I was an object of curiosity to the other five girls in the class. The idea that the invisible tomboy that everybody ignored could become for one day the hottest senior girl in the school fascinated them. And horrified them. They all wondered what would happen to them if they stopped wearing makeup. None of them had the nerve to stop.

One bright sunny and breezy spring day in the afternoon while waiting in the front of the school for the bus to arrive, no-longer-lecherous Larry saw me in the sunlight and stared. He really stared and then walked up to me.

"Did you know that sunlight and a breeze does more for you than even makeup?"

"Yes, I knew. I can't stand in the sunlight for more than a few minutes, though. We freckle-faces sunburn really easily."

"Pity," he said. "You're beautiful in the sun with wind in your hair."

"Don't go back to your old ways, Larry."

"It's not flirting or flattery this time. Simply an observation."

I stood on tiptoe and gave my former nemesis a quick peck on the forehead, and he proceeded to drop all of his books onto the cement. Everybody jerked around to stare. Ah, hell. Two days later Larry had a bookbag just like mine.

Chapter 12: Chapter 12  
Chapter 12: "Senior Prom"

As luck had it, "Star Wars" opened in my town the day of the senior prom. All my buddies in the chess club and I skipped out on the senior prom and went to the 7:30 showing of "Star Wars" instead. We all met at the theater. I walked there. It was only a mile, and back in 1977, my town was not considered a dangerous place. All the freaks and geeks at my high school were there. There was a party atmosphere that I didn't remember at any other movie.

After the movie was over, there were numerous cars out in the parking lot with the trunk lids open and ice coolers nestled inside with dozens of bottles of Coke and Pepsi. People gave away bottles of Coke and Pepsi to anyone from their high school who asked. "Reckless Ricky," "Slowpoke Sammy," and "Blunderin' Billie" stood with me beside a car drinking Cokes and watching the party unfold in the parking lot. Someone had the doors of his car open and "Love Machine" by the Miracles blasted out the new-sounding stereo speakers. A girl dressed entirely in black danced with a geek in a white shirt with a pocket protector. Other people in the parking lot started dancing, too. I danced one-by-one with my fellow chess team members. The parking lot was a freakfest love-in, and was, I'm sure, a lot more fun than any stuffy formal dance such as a senior prom. A night to remember for sure.

After high school graduation, my classmates all scattered to the winds, and almost none remained in town. Our high school was knocked down and a new one, even more soulless than the previous one, was erected. The Elder-Beerman where I bought my bargain-basement senior portrait dress has been vacant over twenty years. The movie theater closed fifteen years ago and now has weeds growing up through the cracks of the pavement in the empty parking lot. The front windows have been broken and boarded up forever. The factories where our parents worked are all gone and abandoned. The population of my city has fallen by twenty-five percent since I graduated from high school. My memories of my high school life now feel as lifeless and meaningless as the empty, abandoned parking lots in the place where I live. How could the vibrant, colorful world of 1977 have ended up in such utter desolation?

The End

Chapter 13: Chapter 13  
Chapter 13: Bonus Chapter for Chess Players

High School Chess Club

Blitz Game (Game / 5 Minutes)

White: Nichole

Black: "Reckless Rickie"

1\. e4 e5

2\. Nf3 Nc6

3\. Nc3 Bc5

4\. Bc4 d6

5\. d3 h6

6\. Be3 Bb6

7\. Qe2 Nf6

8\. h3 Nd4

9\. Bxd4 exd4

10\. Nd5 O-O

11\. O-O-O Nxd5

12\. Bxd5 c6

13\. Bb3 a5

14\. a4 Bc5

15\. Rdg1 b5

16\. Nd2 d5

17\. Qh5 Be6

18\. e5 Rb8

19\. g4 Qb6

20\. g5 hxg5

21\. Rxg5 g6

22\. Rhg1 Rfc8

23\. Rxg6+ Kf8

24\. Rxe6 fxe6

25\. Qh8+ Ke7

26\. Rg7#


	17. Boxwood and Rosewood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A journalist finds a very rare and valuable chess set at an abandoned homeless site. And makes the mistake of taking it home.

Title: Boxwood and Rosewood  
Category: TV Shows » Twilight Zone  
Author: nikkilittle  
Language: English, Rating: Rated: T  
Genre: Fantasy/General  
Published: 06-29-18, Updated: 06-29-18  
Chapters: 6, Words: 2,936  
Chapter 1: Chapter 1  
Boxwood and Rosewood

by Nikki Little

Chapter 1: "The One I Didn't Publish"

In all my years as a journalist, there is only one story that I didn't submit to my editors for publication. When you hear my story, you will surely agree that no newspaper would have published this one – both for its own benefit and mine as well. It all started when two gentlemen whom I had never seen before showed up at the town's tiny chess club on a Saturday night.

It was late spring in 1988 – the tail end of the Reagan era. A time before cell phones, personal computers, laptop computers, and tablets. It was a time when video games were found in arcades. The two gentlemen chuckled when they saw me sitting at a table waiting for an opponent. Everyone else was already engaged in a game when I had entered. I remember noting how unusual it was that they carried no chess equipment with them. No chessboard. No chess pieces. No chess clock. Empty hands.

They introduced themselves as "Mr. Boxwood" and "Mr. Rosewood." I couldn't help laughing at that, but I quickly stopped laughing when "Mr. Boxwood" started a game against me. It was clear that he was a skilled chessplayer.

No one else in the club seemed curious enough about the two newcomers to wander over. They glanced over and then continued their games. I guess we weren't really a very sociable bunch.

We were in an open area of the second floor of the town's public library where there was a collection of tables and chairs. The library closed at midnight. My apartment was within walking distance and the streets of this small town were still fairly safe late at night. You could walk from one end of town to the other in twenty minutes if you didn't stop along the way.

End of Chapter 1

Chapter 2: Chapter 2  
Chapter 2: "After Hours"

When the library personnel chased all us chessplayers out at midnight – we were always the last to leave – "Mr. Boxwood" and "Mr. Rosewood" wanted me to visit their home. I politely declined saying that I had just met them and that a lady does not wander off with strange men in the middle of the night. I suggested next week when perhaps I could gain an escort with some of the other gentlemen in the chess club. I knew all of them well. A lone lady in a chess club tends to be very popular. Especially if she can play chess well. I was the second best player in the club. Only the founder was a better player than me.

The next week on a Saturday night, I wandered in at my usual time of 8:30, and found "Mr. Boxwood" and "Mr. Rosewood" waiting for me. Still no chess equipment of their own. The club founder was sitting with them and chatting with them. Other players in the club glanced over at them occasionally, but went right back to their games. It is normal for players in chess clubs to pair up with players of equal or near-equal strength. The club president and I were the only members above the 1700 rating which is usually considered the border between "average" club players and "strong" club players. So the other players in the club usually ignored us.

The club founder and I played blitz games with our two guests until midnight and were both impressed at the strength of these two players. Both were definitely "Class A" strength, the same as me. The chess club's founder was a rated expert and was the town champion. Every time there was a series of matches for the town championship, it always came down to the club founder and me, and he always won. Not easily, but he always won.

When midnight came, and the library personnel pitched all us chessplayers out, the club founder agreed to tag along to visit the home of our two guests. It wasn't far. Just a few blocks from the library to the edge of town. Right near the abandoned railroad station. That should have tipped me off that something was strange. There were no homes near the abandoned station. Just a few bars and fast-food restaurants.

The club president and I trudged along with our two curiously-named guests. Had I mentioned that boxwood and rosewood were common woods used for chess pieces? Boxwood was almost always used for the white pieces, and rosewood was a common choice for the black pieces.

End of Chapter 2

Chapter 3: Chapter 3  
Chapter 3: "The Tunnel"

The club president, I, and our two guests walked the dimly-lit street down to the abandoned railroad station. We passed the bikers' bars which were still open and crowded and walked past the fast-food restaurants which were now all closed save for the Waffle House which was open 24 hours a day. We saw a few customers in the Waffle House as we walked by the brightly lit interior of the restaurant. One lone cook and one lone waitress were on duty. I noticed a cop sitting at one of the tables drinking coffee. His plate was pushed aside.

Our two guests led us past the abandoned railroad station with all the weeds overgrowing everything. Broken glass had allowed the elements to enter the abandoned building. The glass that was still intact was dirty and opaque. Places where broken glass allowed us to see in revealed two homeless people wrapped in blankets on the filthy floor with backpacks next to them and bottles of water. A mouse scurried by the front entrance on the battered and crumbled concrete. I cringed at the sight of two homeless people. I knew we had some in town, but they did an excellent job of keeping out of sight. We trudged on past the railroad station and I started to wonder just where we were heading. An underground train tunnel loomed ahead. It was underneath a major highway just outside of town.

"Just where are you guys leading us?" demanded to know the chess club president. He was getting suspicious the same as I had the previous week.

"To our home," said "Mr. Boxwood."

"I'm not going any further without an additional escort. And I know just where to find one." The club president turned his heels and walked back to the Waffle House. I guessed why he was going there. He soon returned with the town's night-duty cop who seemed tickled to have something to do besides drive around in a circle, return to the Waffle House for more coffee, drive around in a circle, and then return to the Waffle House for more coffee again and again all night long.

The night cop joined us and off we trudged with our two guest chess players leading the way. Neither seemed disturbed at a cop joining our group, so I did relax a little. The underground train tunnel loomed ahead once again. Right at that moment I realized that our two guest chess players were homeless. They didn't look homeless. Somehow they seemed reasonably clean. We soon discovered how they stayed clean. We stopped a moment at the entrance to the tunnel.

It had been decades since any rail line used the tunnel, so it was perfectly safe to enter. There were no functioning lights inside, but light from street lights above the tunnel filtered in through ventilation shafts. Tall vegetation grew along side the tracks. Litter covered the gravel area of the tracks themselves. No rats in view. The eyes of feral cats in the tunnel glowed as we walked. Our two guests stopped when we heard running water and pointed to a broken pipe at the side of the tunnel spilling water into a lush patch of green vegetation. I started to think about ticks.

"Our shower," said "Mr. Boxwood."

"Also our drinking water," said "Mr. Rosewood."

A few more steps and we reached a clearing in the vegetation. Gravel covered the ground and we saw what looked like two make-shift beds, some rickety wooden shelves with some empty jars and rusted cans, and several tables. On one of the tables sat undisturbed quite filthy wood chess pieces on a very simple wood chessboard.

As the chess club president, cop, and I looked over the chess pieces without touching any of them, we both sensed at pretty much the same time that our chess-playing guests had disappeared. Completely vanished into the air. The cop took out his flashlight and looked for any hidden entrances or exits and found none. We looked around what was once someone's home and realized that no one had been here in years.

End of Chapter 3

Chapter 4: Chapter 4  
Chapter 4: "Boxwood and Rosewood"

"Guys, anyone here thinking we just saw a pair of ghosts?" asked the cop.

The chess club president and I looked at each other and kept our mouths shut. We kept looking around at the surroundings. Finally I spoke up and addressed the cop.

"Would you have any objection if I took the chess pieces and board?"

"Why would you want those filthy pieces?" asked the chess club president.

"Have you taken a really good look at the chess pieces?" I asked. "The pieces are a Pinney Liberty chess set. Made in America. They may be filthy, but they're a collector's item."

The chess club president looked closely at the chess pieces. "I do believe that the black pieces are rosewood," he said. "Aren't Pinney sets in boxwood and rosewood supposed to be incredibly rare?"

"I'd have to investigate that," I said.

"Look you two geeks, I need to make another round of the town, so let me escort you out of here so I can head back to my vehicle."

"Do you have any objection if I take the chess pieces and board?" I asked the cop.

"Nobody's lived here in years," said the cop. "You found them. You take them." The cop headed toward the entrance.

I looked at the chess club president. "You have anything in your car to hold the chess pieces?"

"Plastic shopping bags," he responded. "You want to come back for the chess pieces?"

"Yup. The chess board, too. You willing to come back with me?"

"Okay," he sighed. "Our police escort is gone, though. I think we should be okay."

The chess club president and I picked up some plastic shopping bags from the trunk of his car and returned to the abandoned railroad tunnel to retrieve the chess pieces and chessboard. I wrapped my hands in plastic bags as I didn't want to touch the filthy pieces as I shoveled them into five plastic shopping bags nestled inside each other. I wanted to make sure no pieces fell out the tiny hole in the bottoms of the shopping bags. The chess club president carried the filthy chessboard for me.

When I got home, I put some newspapers on a coffee table, placed the dirty chessboard on top of the newspapers, and set up my filthy treasures. I decided that I needed to buy some disposable rubber gloves and a can of beeswax furniture polish.

Liberty chess sets were normally lacquered, but the set I had in front of me showed no trace of lacquer at all, and seemed to be a rare waxed set instead. I was astounded when an expert in chess equipment informed me that my waxed Pinney boxwood and rosewood Liberty set was unique with no other known examples. In other words, it was priceless.

"It is so valuable that it belongs in a museum," he opined. I was inclined to agree. But what museum would take a chess set?

End of Chapter 4

Chapter 5: Chapter 5  
Chapter 5: "Your Move"

I placed several sheets thickness of newspaper, a can of beeswax furniture polish, and a pair of disposable rubber gloves on my dining room table. I dumped out my filthy treasure, donned the rubber gloves, and began wiping and then buffing the 32 nasty pieces. I did the same with the chessboard. It took several repeat waxings to make the pieces and chessboard presentable, but when I had finished, I had a set worthy of display.

With no television in my living room - I had a tiny one in my bedroom - I bought a small table and two chairs and placed it in the living room near a window. I set up my chessboard and pieces. Sunlight filtering through the trees on the front lawn of my apartment building made for a cozy nook in my small living room in my second-floor flat.

It dawned on me that I had room for a small bookcase along the wall next to the table and chairs. I couldn't afford a "good" bookcase that you bought in a furniture store, but I could afford a ready-to-assemble kit of the kind that college kids bought for their dorm rooms. After the cost of the table and chairs, I'd have to save for awhile.

One day after coming home from work, I noticed that my chess set display on the table was no longer in its starting position. Someone had pushed the White King's Pawn two squares. I tried to think of who might have been in the apartment. The property manager doing an inspection? Not likely. She only did inspections when somebody was in the apartment. The maintenance guy? I hadn't turned in any maintenance requests. I couldn't think of who might have moved the pawn. I pushed Black's Queen's Pawn forward two squares and then went into the kitchen to make dinner. When I went to bed that night, only one move for White and Black each was on the board.

When I awoke in the morning, I found that White had played Pawn takes Pawn. I played Queen takes Pawn entering my favorite Center Counter Defense. Almost no one played it back in the 1980s. It was murderous against the average club player. I won many a game against a class C player in thirty moves or so with it. Against a strong player such as the club president, it could be quite precarious, but I knew the lines backwards and forwards and was confident of my ability to survive any opening surprises.

When I returned home from work, White had moved out his Queen's Knight attacking my Queen. The standard move. I moved my Queen to the side of the board preparing a pin against the Queen's Knight. Also the standard move.

"Mr. Boxwood, I presume."

End of Chapter 5

Chapter 6: Chapter 6  
Chapter 6: "The Library"

If you were a woman, would you want two chess-playing male ghosts wandering around your tiny apartment? Especially two chess-playing male ghosts who were apparently invisible? Not a comforting thought. Especially when I was getting dressed. Well, it's true that I didn't really have a lot to see. Skinny, flat-chested freckle-faces are not exactly at the top of most men's lists of women they'd most like to see naked. Still, I was uncomfortable. The Boxwood and Rosewood Pinney Liberty Chess Set had to go. But what museum would take a chess set?

A research librarian at the tiny town library found the answer for me. Remember that this was 1988 before the internet. Research was not so easy back then. At the Cleveland Public Library in Ohio was a special area known as the "John G. White Chess and Checkers Collections." The librarian gave me the mailing address and telephone number of the special collection and wished me luck.

I took some photographs of my Pinney Liberty Set and chessboard and enclosed them in a letter offering the set to the special collection. I emphasized that this set was a rare Pinney Liberty Set in Boxwood and Rosewood and was the only known example that was waxed rather than lacquered. Needless to say, I got a response. They were curious as to why I did not want to sell the set. A collector might have paid several thousand dollars for the set, but selling it direct to a collector would have been difficult. The antiques dealers, I knew, would hem and haw about how generous a few hundred dollars for the set was, and then put it up for sale for five thousand dollars. I preferred to give the set away. Especially since the chess set was haunted. Yes, I wanted it out of my apartment as soon as possible.

Since I lived in northwestern Pennsylvania, Cleveland wasn't that far to drive. I made an appointment at the special collection by telephone and met a curator in the library. He already had a display place ready for the set and chessboard and the labels were ready, too. I was impressed with the security for the collection. Everything was behind locked glass panels. I felt good about this as a home both for the chess set and board and the two lost souls who seemed to go with them.

Every few years after I gave the chess set and chessboard away, I saw in the newspaper a human interest story about the "haunted" chess collection at the Cleveland Public Library. Library workers late at night just after closing kept reporting hearing the sounds of two chessplayers playing "blitz." The sound of two players banging on a chess clock every few seconds is unmistakeable to anyone who has ever entered a chess club. I couldn't help smiling when I saw these articles. My "Mr. Boxwood" and "Mr. Rosewood" had found in death the paradise that real life had denied them.

The End


	18. A Game of Checkers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A father and daughter burdened by caregiving duties can't seem to find time to play a game of checkers.

A Game of Checkers

by Nikki Little

 

Once upon a time a father, mother, and daughter all lived together in a small house on a dead-end street that bordered on a long-abandoned and overgrown farm. It was a rather remote place at the edge of the city, and there were only twelve houses on the street. Three of the houses were empty, including the one on the left of the small house from the front porch. The front and back yards of the empty house were overgrown with tall grass and weeds. The vegetation was full of ticks, chiggers, and other nasty little critters. The father and mother were both 91 years old and the daughter was 60. The father and daughter were in reasonably good health for their age, but the mother was totally disabled and depended on the father and daughter to do everything for her. The father and daughter had been caring for the disabled woman for years. And every year seemed longer than the last. 

The father did the care during the day while the daughter slept. While the father worked, the mother watched TV all day long. The noise from the TV made it difficult for the daughter to sleep. The endless parade of QVC, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Andy Griffith annoyed her to no end. The daughter got up in the evening and ate dinner with everyone else although often she did her own cooking for herself. The mother was finicky and wouldn't eat the daughter's fish or rice or stir-fries. The father put his wife to bed at around 11 o'clock and went off-duty. The daughter was the "night nurse." She did bathroom duties and household chores during the night so that her exhausted father could sleep. Night was the only time that the mother would tolerate her daughter doing bathroom duties. It took the father spending three days in the hospital before the mother relented and let the daughter do bathroom duties.

The father had collapsed at church. Useless Brother had brought Mother back home and rang the doorbell waking up the sleeping daughter who never went to church because she couldn't afford the loss of sleep. Taking care of Mother was a seven-day a week job with no days off. Ever. Brother looked annoyed as he rolled Mother's wheelchair into the living room and explained that Father had fainted at church and was taken away in an ambulance. Brother quickly split to go to the hospital. The hospital did three days of tests on Father and found nothing. Father's fainting spell had been from exhaustion. Daughter could have told the doctors that.

Daughter was alone with Mother for three days with no help. Brother never showed even once. Mother's needs were endless. Every 90 minutes or so Daughter had to maneuver a patient stand in front of Mother's wheelchair, get her into the stand, wrestle the stand to her parents' bedroom, and then maneuver Mother onto a "potty seat." Think cat litter box for humans without the sand. The stink when Mother had a number 2 was enough to gag a skunk.

Three days the daughter went without sleep taking care of Mother's needs. The endless noise from the TV assaulted Daughter's sleep-deprived brain. Brother never showed. Nobody called on the telephone to check. After three days, the daughter was exhausted and started looking for a respite center to put Mother in. Mother called the hospital.

"You have to come home right now because she's going to put me in a rest home!" wailed the mother. She didn't ask if Father was alright. She didn't ask if he still had tests that needed to be done. Her needs came first. Just like they had when Father had wanted to go to the funeral for his brother Jim in Kentucky.

Uncle Jim was Daughter's favorite uncle. Uncle Jim loved to play checkers and was the checker champion of the senior center in his small town in Kentucky. Mother said Father's first duty was to her. Mother expected Father to stay home and take care of her. Daughter volunteered to take care of Mother so Father could go to the funeral. Mother was not happy. Daughter had never seen Father defy Mother before. This one time was the only time it happened.

Daughter was ready to faint from exhaustion. Father called from the hospital to come pick him up. No bus service in the city. No taxis, either. Daughter, so exhausted she wobbled as she walked, drove to the hospital. She might as well have been driving drunk. The angels must have been watching because she arrived at the hospital in one piece. Father drove home.

Mother was full of complaints and devoid of gratitude. Father stepped behind Mother for a moment and turned off his hearing aid. "Yes, Dear, yes, Dear..." he said as Mother griped and complained. He nodded his head up and down. He didn't hear a thing. It was how he stayed sane.

Daughter bought Father a fabulous wood checker set and an exquisite wood red-and-black chessboard to go with the checker set for Christmas that year. Nobody made checkerboards anymore, and checkers players had to settle for a chessboard instead. A red and black chessboard was truly tough to find. The board was made of black wenge wood and reddish padauk wood. It was spectacular. A board fit for a world championship match. Daughter hoped to play an occasional game with her father.

Mother's needs were endless. Just keeping up with the housework and cooking was nearly impossible. Daughter and Father never had spare time at the same time. Daughter was always asleep when Father found a few spare moments. When Daughter found a few spare moments, Father was always busy in the kitchen, outside in the yard, doing laundry in the basement, or asleep in the night when Daughter was awake doing bathroom duty and household chores. The checkerboard gathered dust in Daughter's bedroom. Two years passed.

The inevitable happened. Father collapsed again. This time at home. Daughter called for an ambulance while Mother panicked. Who would take care of her? Who did she think?

Daughter cared for Mother as best she could for three days. Three days with no sleep. No rest. After three days Daughter started to call about respite care again. Mother called the hospital. This time the doctors did not let Father come home. They had more tests to run. They played with his blood pressure medication. They had him do stress tests. They had a patient with good insurance, and the doctors seemed intent on running up the bill as high as possible. Daughter could have told them it was exhaustion again.

Mother refused respite care. "This is my home and I'm not leaving!" Daughter lay on the floor and said she was too tired to move.

"If you want to stay in this home, you'll take care of me!" said Mother.

Daughter staggered upward and took Mother to the potty seat. The inane patter of QVC spewed from the TV. Every trip to the potty seat was about a fifteen minute production. Daughter finished cleaning Mother up and took her back to her wheelchair. Mother could get to the telephone from her wheelchair. Mother also had a cell phone on her vanity dresser that she could reach.

Daughter disappeared into the basement and headed to Father's gun rack. A shotgun, a 22 - caliber Marlin for rabbits, and a 30-30 Marlin for deer. Daughter pulled down the 30-30 Marlin, covered the round table with newspaper, and took out Father's gun-cleaning kit. Nobody knew it, but daughter had been studying how to use a rifle. She laid her cleaning checklist by the rifle and pulled out the necessary items from the kit. The kit was new and had everything necessary. Daughter knew this because she was the one who had purchased the kit.

Cleaning finished, Daughter went to a drawer in a vanity downstairs, and pulled out the 30-30 ammunition which she had bought the year she purchased the checkerboard. The ammunition had remained hidden behind a stored laptop computer for all that time. Daughter loaded up the 30-30 Marlin. Six bullets in the magazine. The TV blared upstairs. She pumped the lever to load the chamber. She went back upstairs one last time to check with Mother. Every step on the basement stairs took her breath away. She staggered into the living room. Mother was still watching QVC.

"You won't consider a few days in a respite center so I can get some sleep?" she asked Mother.

"You're just trying to get rid of me! This is my home. I'm not leaving!"

"Very well, Mother."

Mother seemed to gloat. As usual, she had gotten her way. Or so she thought. Daughter went back downstairs and made sure to close the basement door just in case Mother rolled into the dining room.

Daughter went back downstairs and picked up the loaded 30-30 Marlin. She walked out the back door to the porch, put the barrel in her mouth, cocked the hammer, switched off the safety, and pulled the trigger. No pain. No pain at all.

Mother heard the noise on the back porch, but thought that it was something from a neighboring home. The blare from the TV partly covered the noise of the gunshot. She waited for Daughter to return. She had to go to the potty. Daughter did not come. Where was that useless wench? Mother called for Daughter. No Daughter. Mother called the hospital. Father could not come home. Father said to call Brother. Brother did not answer the phone. All she got was voice mail. Mother started to panic and rolled her wheelchair as fast as she could to the dining room window. She leaned forward to see out the window. And fell forward onto the floor.

It was three days she lay there on the floor before she died of thirst. Yes, it can happen in three days. The telephone was in the bedroom and out of reach. Her cell phone was on her vanity in the bedroom. Out of reach. Brother never came to check on Mother or Daughter. He had a grueling six-day-a-week job and his own problems. He was too busy to help.

Father called the house four days after Mother fell from the wheelchair to have Daughter come pick him up at the hospital. Daughter was not available. No one answered the phone. Father called Brother and left a message. Hours later, Brother, looking annoyed, showed up at the hospital to ferry Father home.

Father and Brother discovered the bodies. Brother looked annoyed. Now he had to help plan two funerals. Father shook his head. Soul-crushing weariness pulled on his shoulders. "No funerals," Father said. "Considering the circumstances, immediate cremation and scattering of ashes for both."

"No service or headstone for either?" asked Brother.

"Nope." 

Brother called for the police, and the mess was cleaned up. Both bodies cremated with no service or headstone. Father picked up the ashes at the funeral home and brought home the urns. He scattered Daughter's ashes in the back yard in the flower garden that was was always full of birds that she loved to watch. A wren lit on the fence just as he finished and began to sing. Father lingered a moment to listen.

Mother's ashes were spilled a little bit at a time in the toilet and flushed. "Good riddance, bitch!" whispered Father under his breath as he watched his wife's ashes swirl in the toilet with each flush. 

After dealing with the ashes, Father walked into the living room, and turned on the TV to watch the evening news uninterrupted by any potty trips. He fell asleep on the couch while watching the news. He dreamed of playing a game of checkers with his daughter on the dining room table. When he awoke, he found the checkerboard and checkers pieces on the dining room table. The position appeared to be of a game just finished. Ever after that, once or twice a month, he would dream of playing checkers with his daughter and find the checkerboard on the dining room table after he awoke with the pieces in the position of a finished game.

The End

Version 3


End file.
